Jerry Saltz Quotes

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.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

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

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Society becomes how we behave.

I've heard people say, 'There are no bad audiences,' but that's just not true. There are people who just shouldn't be together in a room, who produce a really bad audience.

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.

People influence each other, so one screening will be filled with laughs while another is dead silent.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.

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

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 not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

Gentlemen lacking substantial sympathy with their leader found it to be comfortable to deceive themselves, and raise their hearts at the same time by the easy enthusiasm of noise.

Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.

If 20,000 people start to sing, you tend to go along with it.

A being whose activities are associated with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology.

When you have a couple hundred people in one huge space, that's gonna lead to jokes and it's a breeding ground for practical jokes and teasing.

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.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.