Fyodor Dostoevsky Quotes

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

If it true that perception is reality, then what is shown on TV is that part of the collective consciousness known as Public Knowledge, that is, the fragment of reality which the mass of people acknowledge to be true.

If you don't like potlucks, the solution to your problem is "don't go to potlucks," not "insist other people don't have them."

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

The Amoeba?" she asked Aiden. "The gang," he said, tossing his hand to indicate all around. "My people. A large amorphous mass that keeps on changing size, hasn't much apparent use, sometimes makes you sick, and occasionally breaks off into smaller parts that act exactly like the parent.

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

Among the types of thoughts that affect action, none is more central or pervasive than people's judgments of their capabilities to deal effectively with different realities

The essence of Ananda is both personal and sociological. Personally for people who seek truth or identities of God, it helps to be with other people who share those ideals. Environment is stronger than willpower, and when you are with people who have high ideals, it helps you to grow in your ideals.

The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

The reality which is pretending be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can't find people who are actively involved of affected by it. What you see is a completely different world, what you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...

A leader is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a people reverts to a mob.