Lee Ryan Quotes

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

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.

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

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

I decide to do what I always do when I'm not sure what's going on: I act like everyone else.

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.

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

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.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

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.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single 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.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

... 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.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.