Karl Jaspers Quotes

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

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

The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.

Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.

One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

I was always at about 70/30. About 70 percent of the people of my district appreciated me, and about 30 percent had quite another view of me.

There's a lot of social input when you put these things out there. People's ideas cross with other people's thoughts.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

Public Opinion... an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.

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.

If it true that perception is reality, then what is shown on TV is that part of the collective consciousness known as Public Knowledge, that is, the fragment of reality which the mass of people acknowledge to be true.

It is because the public are a mass inert, obtuse, and passive that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.

Public opinion in the United States has shifted significantly, not just outside but also within the Jewish community.

It is the practice of the multitude to bark at eminent men, as little dogs do at strangers.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.