Eric Hoffer Quotes

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

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

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.

People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. 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. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

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.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

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

A big element of what they regard as conformity is simply a desire to have an audience.

Most people live their life around what other people do.

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 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.

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 herd animals, and prefer to go with the flow, especially when moving in the other direction is harsh.

In wartime the herd instinct rise …

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.