Herd Behavior Quotes

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

It is an unfortunate fact that great and foolish excess can come into prices of common stocks in the aggregate. They are valued partly like bonds, based on roughly rational projections of use value in producing future cash. But they are also valued partly like Rembrandt paintings, purchased mostly because their prices have gone up, so far.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

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.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

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

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.

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

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don't have to eat... eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.

It has been very truly said that the mob has many heads, but no brains.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

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.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism. Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

The majority is always sane.

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