Stephen Vizinczey Quotes

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.

If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong.

Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

We try to make sensible decisions with the facts in front of us. The problem with sensible decisions is that so is everyone else.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

Fashion is a social agreement. the result of a consensus of a large group of people.

Unanimity of opinion is characteristic of savages and civilization only advances as more and more people have the right to call wrong what the majority calls right..

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually

Many guys seem to think that his thoughts and feelings are always right and always the best option. I think I am the same kind of guy.

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

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

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

In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.

This leads to a question - if a great many people are for a certain project, is it necessarily right? If the vast majority is for it, is it even more certainly right? This, to be sure, is one of the tricky points of democracy. The minority often turns out to be right, and though one believes in the efficacy of the democratic process, one has also to recognize that the demand of the many for a particular project at a particular time may mean only disaster.

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

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

In unanimity there may well be either cowardice or uncritical thinking.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

Most of us believe everyone has a right to his own opinion - as long as it agrees with ours.

The last thing we want is a monolithic viewpoint where six people are standing before a president saying the same thing over and over again.

Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled. You said the only way things could've gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.

I think people are looking for an alternative because in addition to there being sort of a myopic, lemming - like ants on a sugar cube mentality on this DNS attack story by many in the media, there's just this culture of sameness. Everybody sounds the same.

How will the world change if we do not question it?

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.