Elias Canetti Quotes

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.

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

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

I like big crowds. I find it easier to focus.

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 can forget anything, and actually being a part of a crowd, of a group, can itself be freeing.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

I think of people as members of an audience. But an audience acts independently of every individual. It's an organism on its own. I focus on that living hydra in the dark.

Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

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.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.

A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from, or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable or more cruel.

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.

… 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…

I always look at everyone when we're on the street and think, 'We're like sheep or ants.'

An audience can become a mob very easily.

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.