Isabella Bird Quotes

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

One day through the primeval wood A calf walked home as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. . . . . And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Too bad your inner sheep never forgets to follow.

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.

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.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

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.

It has been very truly said that the mob has many heads, but no brains.

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

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

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

Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they'll all turn over together.

And weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

'Crowd folly', the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior - like investment management practices of many foundations represented here today. It is sad that today each institutional investor apparently fears most of all that its investment practices will be different from practices of the rest of the crowd.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.