Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

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.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Consensus is what many people say in chorus but do not believe as individuals.

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

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

All becomes easy when we follow the current of opinion; it is the ruler of the world.

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

When your opinions start to coincide with those of the majority, it is time to reconsider your opinions.

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

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.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.