John C. Maxwell Quotes

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

When in doubt, look at what everyone else is doing.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

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

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

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.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

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.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

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.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.