Mark Twain Quotes

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter.

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.

There is nothing more dangerous than debate in a crowd.

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together ... they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief. In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part.

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

Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school.

Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.

... 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 sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.

What one person does, several people usually consider.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

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

But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.