Herbert Gold Quotes

Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and justifications of the collective action the less is his participation in that action.

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

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

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've always been interested in social psychology and why certain groups of people do things while others don't.

A crowd is always impressed by the sum of its own number.

Men go crazy in congregation. They only get better one by one.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly.

Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.

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

In the hands of vicious men, a mob will do anything. But under good leaders it's quite a different story.

We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line.

If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is - and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.

There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.

no one in a group of three is the same person he (she, it) is in a group of two. No more than he is the same in a group of two as he is alone.

Most human behavior is controlled by images. Image is a factor in how people look at themselves and what they use to reflect themselves. The control of images is a major factor in world power.

The reputation of power IS power.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.