Bret Stephens Quotes

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

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

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

Men are herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

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.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

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

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.

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.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

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.

It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.

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

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

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

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