Antoine Rivarol Quotes

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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

It is a well- known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually, when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain.

But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.

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.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

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

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

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.

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.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

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

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

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

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

… 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…

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

Too bad your inner sheep never forgets to follow.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

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.