Charles Mackay Quotes

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

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

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

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.

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

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

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.

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.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

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

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.

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

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

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.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

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

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 mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

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.