Alain de Botton Quotes

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

When a man can take a poll and tell what everybody is thinking, that means nobody is really thinking anymore.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

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

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

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

He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconsistent, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters. That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things. It's distressingly easy for those mechanisms to be triggered, either consciously by demagogues, or naively by people who think they're trying to do the right thing. Which is why I think it's more akin to tic-tac-toe.

Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.

I also think that there's a little peer pressure. They probably think that a majority of people their age think the same things and they want to be considered - I don't know what the word is - in, hip, whatever, with that bunch. I think time will take care of some of this as it is revealed that [Donald] Trump is not what they think.

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.

Sometimes I take a temperature of things just because everyone else does. Especially when I'm doing a play. I want to know what people are thinking, positive or negative.

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

Because other people are fools, must you be so too?

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?