Emma Goldman Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

Collective madness is called sanity.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

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.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

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

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

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

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.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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.

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

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

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