"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
— Harlan Ellison

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established."
— Aristotle

""You are hard at work madam ," said the man near her.
"Yes," Answered Madam Defarge ; " I have a good deal to do."
"What do you make, Madam ?"
"Many things."
"For instance ---"
"For instance," returned Madam Defarge , composedly ,
"Shrouds."
The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, feeling it mightily close and oppressive ."
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

"To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim. "
— Remy de Gourmont

"For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd in front, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace,, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca