Neal Stephenson Quotes

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.

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.

People huddle together in doctrinaire herds, and the same jackasses who, without the slightest risk, now scream against racism are the same conformist personality types who would have carried torches in lynch mobs a century ago.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

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'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

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.

The undignified mania of adaptive conformity, exhibited by many of my kinsmen, has always been very repulsive to me.

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

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

I can understand why people are bad.

Collective madness is called sanity.

For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.

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.