Jean Francois Paul de Gondi Quotes

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

There is nothing more dangerous than debate in a crowd.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

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.

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

A crowd is an elemental thing. A word, a glance, and a crowd becomes a mob.

The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

Abnormal stresses and strains tend to accentuate man's animal instincts and provoke irrational and socially disruptive behavior among the less stable individuals in the maddening crowd.

Sometimes the energy of the crowd also catches on to you.

All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.