Terry Pratchett Quotes

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 individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice.

Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

'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.

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

It is a well- known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually, when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain.

Deux fous gagnent toujours, mais trois fous, non!

How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?

Were it not for Scientology, I would either be completely insane or dead by now.

What really interests me, on a deeper level, is how our information is coming to us in some kind of messed up way that is making us idiotic. I don't think we've become more idiotic than we always were, but I think the information transfer is funky. The shorthand of it is that social media is making us mentally insane.

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

Are — you — insane?” said Hermione in a hushed voice. 'I don't think so,' said Harry, shrugging.

You can't stop insane people from doing insane things with insane laws. That's insane!

I think there was no other profession for me. I was either going into an insane asylum or to be an actor.

Have you ever wondered... how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists... but the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has a headache.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.