George Carlin Quotes

You can't forge a new sort of consensus, you can't forge public opinion, by following public opinion.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

... 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 audience works as such a mob. They either all laugh or all don't laugh, and, you know, changes from audience to audience.

Public opinion has become the public law

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

Society becomes how we behave.

The crowd is a pretty good indicator when it's good, because it's kind of a universal energy that gets passed around.

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.

A crowd is always impressed by the sum of its own number.

People with the same information often make the same decisions.

There is a noticeable difference from a crowd surging against you and a crowd surging with you.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

People influence each other, so one screening will be filled with laughs while another is dead silent.

When the audience reacts all together, it's genius. The audience is its own being in a way. It's a weird, amorphous beast that is also somehow a golden emperor that is also somehow every adult you've ever come across in your life who doesn't approve of you - all in one place.

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

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

Besides, hysteria is only possible with an audience.

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.

The majority is the best way, because it is visible, and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.

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

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

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.

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.