George Jean Nathan Quotes

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.

I am not aware of my public image or what people think of me. I don't evaluate myself that way.

He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconsistent, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.

Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.

Wonderful Force of Public Opinion! We must act and walk in all points as it prescribes; follow the traffic it bids us, realize the sum of money, the degree of influence it expects of us, or we shall be lightly esteemed; certain mouthfuls of articulate wind will be blown at us, and this what mortal courage can front?

Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.

We cannot at once catch the applauses of the vulgar and expect the approbation of the wise.

Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Your friends may love you in private but your enemies will hate you in public.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

We are praised or blamed, as the one or the other may be expedient, for displaying to advantage our power of discernment.

Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.

You're still being looked at as somebody who - it's a very complicated issue.

It is the practice of the multitude to bark at eminent men, as little dogs do at strangers.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

What we call public opinion is generally public sentiment.