Mark Twain Quotes

Well, I try not to think about the general public since I have no idea what the general public is and I don't think anybody does.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

You can't forge a new sort of consensus, you can't forge public opinion, by following public opinion.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

I've always tried to figure out what people think of themselves and what they think they're projecting.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

We all have these notions of cool that come about at different points in our lives, and it's interesting in how it evolves or doesn't evolve in different people.

You learn more about a person from the people around that person than you do from the person themselves. We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

No law is stronger than is the public sentiment where it is to be enforced.

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

Society becomes how we behave.