Mark Bowden Quotes

Most people live their life around what other people do.

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

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

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

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.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

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

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

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

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

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

The laughers are a majority.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say "R.I.P.! R.I.P.!" Basically they're saying, "Don't hurt me, I'm a good person."

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

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.

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