Walter Bagehot Quotes

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

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.

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

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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.

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

What the multitude says is so, or soon will be.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

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

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

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

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.

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

The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.

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.

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

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.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

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

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.