Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

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

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

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

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

You know what happened the last time a group of people said, 'Screw it, we don't care what you think'? They got hung as witches.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

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.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Peer pressure and social norms are powerful influences on behaviour, and they are classic excuses.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

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

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

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

When a man can take a poll and tell what everybody is thinking, that means nobody is really thinking anymore.

… the irresistible power of concentrated public opinion

Conformity--the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

As humans, we're so easily persuaded. We join this cause or that cause, and suddenly the other thing is wrong.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.