Robert Musil Quotes

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

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.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

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

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.

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.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

It is a well- known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually, when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain.

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

Madness is no madness when shared.

Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

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.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.