Heraclitus Quotes

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.

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

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

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.

When I left NSA, it was with an understanding that you can never underestimate the power of large numbers of stupid people.

Money often moves around like a high school kid with no personality - it goes with the crowd.

Fear is hugely contagious. Used skillfully by politicians looking to manipulate voters, it can become toxic and capable of infecting more than just a few.

And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

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.

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

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

If you listen to fools... The Mob Rules!

Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing

Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.

Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.

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.

Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something - and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood.

I don't really understand it even now, It does have an angle which is attached to something quite primal in girls. I guess people want it to define them, like 'I'm a Twilight fan.' That's crazy to me. I think people really just like being part of a crowd. There's something just tremendously exciting about hyping yourself up to that level.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.