Charlie Chaplin Quotes

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

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.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

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

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

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

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Baseball regards us as sheep.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

Men are herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

… 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…

The majority of business people are sheeple.