John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

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.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

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

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

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.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

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.