Max Beerbohm Quotes

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

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.

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

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.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

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

... 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.

We're all sheep and lemmings to some degree.

Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

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

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

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.

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.

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

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.

Online, you're trying to appeal to everyone and people who you don't know at the same time. So I think, as a side effect, it amplifies the desire for groupthink.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow. -Lady Whistledown