Paul Heyman Quotes

When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

With four people you can create one very strong kind of energy, but if you can get 65 people working together, and swinging together, that's a whole other kind of energy.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

Unorganized masses … are highly unpredictable in character

I love giving the energy and getting the energy back. There is nothing like it.

A crowd is always impressed by the sum of its own number.

The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

When the audience reacts all together, it's genius. The audience is its own being in a way. It's a weird, amorphous beast that is also somehow a golden emperor that is also somehow every adult you've ever come across in your life who doesn't approve of you - all in one place.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.

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.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

If obedience is the result of the instinct of the masses, revolt is the result of their thought.

Gentlemen lacking substantial sympathy with their leader found it to be comfortable to deceive themselves, and raise their hearts at the same time by the easy enthusiasm of noise.

Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others.

It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.

We would normally play it to Cynthia or whoever was around