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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
an entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become a crowd under the action of certain influences.
It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.
an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.
The crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes,
Crowds are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion.
Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty, and always go to extremes
Crowds instinctively hostile to changes and progress.
crowds are in consequence extremely mobile.
the sentiments of the crowd is immediately an accomplished fact.
Crowds think in images, and these images succeed each other without any connecting link
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.
Among the remote factors there are some of a general nature, which are found to underlie all the beliefs and opinions of crowds. They are race, traditions, time, institutions, and education.
fact that the crowds of different countries offer very considerable differences of beliefs and conduct and are not to be influenced in the same manner.
The ideal for a people is in consequence to preserve the institutions of the past, merely changing them insensibly and little by little. This ideal is difficult to realise.
The action of centuries is sufficient to transform any given phenomenon.
It is by the aid of time that they acquire their strength and also by its aid that they lose it.
national progress is the consequence of the improvement of institutions and governments, and that social changes can be effected by decrees—this idea,
It is illusions and words that have influenced the mind of the crowd, and especially words—words which are as powerful as they are chimerical,
criminality increases with the generalisation of instruction, or at any rate of a certain kind of instruction,
that well-directed instruction may not give very useful practical results, if not in the sense of raising the standard of morality,
the intelligence is developed by the learning by heart of text-books.
a violent dislike to the state of life in which they were born,
§1. Images, words and formulae.
§2. Illusions.
§3. Experience.
§4. Reason.
Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, &c.,
Their only utility is to prove to what an extent experiences need to be repeated from age to age to exert any influence,
We have already shown that crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.
The laws of logic have no action on crowds.{16}
cannot avoid having recourse to this mode of persuasion when addressing crowds,
sentiments such as honour, self- sacrifice, religious faith, patriotism, and the love of glory.
The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers.
affirmation, repetition, and contagion. Their action is somewhat slow, but its effects, once produced, are very lasting.
