Leslie Charteris Quotes

Thousands of people seeing the same thing cannot all be wrong.

You have seen it: You can put something into the world, and all of a sudden, everybody believes that. Like throwing a fishing rod and the fish bite into.

Citizens have long been easily influenced by the opinions of others and sought social proof, but social media have amplified the phenomena to unprecedented heights. As digital devices permeate every aspect of our lives, it has boosted the way in which information can distort truth.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.

The nature of rumor is known to all.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

Foolish many said; foolish many, many believed.

There is always somebody to believe in any one who is uppermost.

I wish that the television would show the long shot. They show you an angry mob violently protesting. But if you look at a long shot, you see that it is 10 idiots in a parking lot.

How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better

It is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if those idiotic ideas are broadly and fervently believed.

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

It is easier to mislead many men than one.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

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.

Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.

Rumors are always out there.

I know that if enough people shout a falsehood, people start to think it's true and a lot of people don't do independent verification of everything they hear.

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

The people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.