Moliere Quotes

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

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.

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.

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

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

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 hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

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.

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

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.

If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

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.

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men's opinions than to bring them over to ours.

Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

I decide to do what I always do when I'm not sure what's going on: I act like everyone else.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hairstyle, criticize anyone who's different, go to a religious service and beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise the other tribe who worships a false god.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.