Eric Hoffer Quotes

When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.

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

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

Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.

If 20,000 people start to sing, you tend to go along with it.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

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.

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.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

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.

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

I'll say this: The scariest monster in the world is human beings and what we are capable of, especially when we get together.

I always look at everyone when we're on the street and think, 'We're like sheep or ants.'

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don't even see. It's so easy. Look at Wall Street - look at any sports team in the world - there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that's what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

The thing that can happen in a TV room is you can get 'teamthink': you can all go down a crazy path together.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

... 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.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

I think of people as members of an audience. But an audience acts independently of every individual. It's an organism on its own. I focus on that living hydra in the dark.

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.