Thomas Browne Quotes

The great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the Multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

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

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

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

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.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

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.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

Nor should we listen to those who say "The voice of the people is the voice of God," for the turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity.

… 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…

You cheer for me, but you would hang me if your mood changed.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

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

Collective madness is called sanity.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit. We should not listen to those who like to affirm that the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the tumult of the masses is truly close to madness.

In the meantime, I would drink, rest, and ponder the meaning of this mob.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

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

I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff." Well, no such thing.

Lynch mobs are democracies.

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

Do not be confused by what the natural world knows: We are all, in our own way, completely and totally alone. If love is real, it is complete and total failing of the intellect. It is utter self-destruction. It is pandemonium.