Wentworth Dillon Roscommon Quotes

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

There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right”.

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

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

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.

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

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.

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

Nor is the People's Judgment always true: The Most may err as grossly as the Few.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

A pernicious error is, that multitude is divine because it is multitude.

Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.

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

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

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.

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

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

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

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

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

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

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.