Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I've probably said a million times in my life something about, "All those people are just lemmings. They'd follow each other off a cliff." Well, no such thing.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

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.

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

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.

Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

It is a good part of sagacity to have known the foolish desires of the crowd and their unreasonable notions.

No member of any society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

The public must be put in its place...so that each of us can live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

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

Collective madness is called sanity.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.