Rene Girard Quotes

I took drugs because we all took drugs.

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.

Like timidity, bravery is also contagious.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

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

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

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 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.

A crowd is always impressed by the sum of its own number.

People say things they'll never do but then do them because they want to be a part of 'this great thing.'

There is a noticeable difference from a crowd surging against you and a crowd surging with you.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

I am fascinated by these ocean-grown folks. On the coast, there's all this cross-pollination of ideas. Someone thinks they saw something. One person's madness is reiterated by another, and a story is born. The rumour becomes a substitute for news.

History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

People influence each other, so one screening will be filled with laughs while another is dead silent.

... 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.

You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread.

Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.

Men go crazy in congregation. They only get better one by one.