Soren Kierkegaard Quotes

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb.

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.

Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

what is popular need not necessarily be right or wise.

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 crowd has a way of being right.

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

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

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

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

How many fools does it take to make up a public?

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

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

… the irresistible power of concentrated public opinion

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.

When I left NSA, it was with an understanding that you can never underestimate the power of large numbers of stupid people.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

It is proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.