David Joseph Schwartz Quotes

People watch movies - and it's vague ideas, it's vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that they are supposed to think certain ways or that they're not supposed to think, basically, and they don't.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

It's insidious how Hollywood warps your values without you even realizing that it's happening to you. You get a little whiff of success and it whets your appetite, and before you know it you're going right down the road they've laid out for you.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.

Suppose everyone on our side felt that way?

I think we are affected by others in all kinds of ways. I do understand what it's like to wish to control the conditions under which we can be affected by other human beings, but none of us really are.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

Reality is self-defined as the mob, any mob, writes its own history, never to be contradicted by the quiet statement of truth.

I don't like going to 155; I do it because everyone else does.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, we are the influencers.

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

Too bad your inner sheep never forgets to follow.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.