Charles Fort Quotes

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.

Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.

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.

Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

Baseball regards us as sheep.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they’re an elite, that they’ve got a mission, that they’re making history, that they’re fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.

The sad truth about humanity...is that people believe what they're told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.

It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.

People in Washington seem as hypnotized by precedence as though they were hens with their beaks on a chalk line.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature. I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program. They're perfectly happy to take their pill every day and do what they're told, and work and buy things, and work and buy things, and stay out of any complex emotional situations. And whatever the authorities tell them to do, they do, and whatever the authorities say is the truth, they believe is the truth.

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hairstyle, criticize anyone who's different, go to a religious service and beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise the other tribe who worships a false god.

Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...

A cult is a cult, and that's what a frat is. A place where they strip you of your personality and rebuild it in their image.