Evan Osnos Quotes

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

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

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

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

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

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'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

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 world chooses to think what the world thinks.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

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.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

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.

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

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

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

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