James A. Garfield Quotes

The multitude is always in the wrong.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

Our leaders are acting like lemmings.

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.

The majority of business people are sheeple.

If all the media are singing one song, it gets dangerous; it really does.

When I left NSA, it was with an understanding that you can never underestimate the power of large numbers of stupid people.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Baseball regards us as sheep.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.