Steven Cojocaru Quotes

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

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.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

Fame or perceived success - it all comes from groupthink.

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

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

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

… the irresistible power of concentrated public opinion

People gravitate to what they believe to be popular... Technology is enabling even more of that.

Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.

We're constantly being fed images and being told what to like and what is good, and for the most part, I think people enjoy living that way. It takes a lot of the thinking out of it.

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

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

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.

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

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.

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

For some critics we might be uncool on account of our popularity.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

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

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.