Ivor Novello Quotes

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

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.

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

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.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

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.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

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

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

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.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

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

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.