Amitava Kumar Quotes

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

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

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.

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

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

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.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

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.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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

The advantage of being a leftist has always been that it's easy. You don't have to think, you just need to feel. You don't need to reason, engage in inquiry, or study. You just need to have emotions and express them.

If all the media are singing one song, it gets dangerous; it really does.

I can think of nothing worse than a think-tank where everybody agreed.

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

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

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

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.

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

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.