Samuel Johnson Quotes

What the multitude says is so, or soon will be.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

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

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

The public must be put in its place...so that each of us can live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown

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

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

The public is so in awe of its own opinion that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behindhand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

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

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

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.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.