Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.

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

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

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

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

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.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Baseball regards us as sheep.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.