Mob Mentality Quotes

“All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.”
― Aristotle

“A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous.”
― C.G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”
― Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge

“National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A river is easier to channel than to stop.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

“...when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.”
― Cass R. Sunstein, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

“A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men.”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insurrectionist-in otherwords, someone who incites mobs.
Again, the mob "spoke with one voice" demanding "with loud shouts" that Jesus be crucified.”
― Ann Coulter, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America

“When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in anticipation of what he was soon to become.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“The factory-bells had need to ring their loudest that morning to disperse the groups of workers who stood in the tardy daybreak, collected round the placards [wanted posters], devouring them with eager eyes. Not the least eager of the eyes assembled, were the eyes of those who could not read. These people, as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud--there was always some such ready to help them--stared at the characters which meant so much with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and full of evil.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“An oppressor mob is far more dangerous than an oppressor tyrant.”
― Abhijit Naskar, No Foreigner Only Family

“People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable.”
― Brian Evenson

“A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.”
― James Baldwin, Dark Days

“It is imperative that all uprising be guided by an urge for justice, not a craving for revenge.”
― Abhijit Naskar, No Foreigner Only Family

“On a normal day, these people would be buying from the bakers, tailors, cordwainers, binders and candlemakers lining the boulevard. They’d be smiling and laughing, grumbling about the infernal heat, but manacle a man and offer him up to torment, and even the meekest soul surrendered itself to the devil.”
― Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water

“The temper of the multitude is fickle”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human

“Hold just enough ego to be a man of your word, and to stand against evil mobs who force the absurd.”
― Criss Jami

“But nothing could assuage the unconscious fury of our new and tragic understanding, our sense of having been cheated, our fear, for, however we looked for it, we could not find a fit object for our disgust and despair, and so we attacked everything in our way with an equal and infinite passion…”
― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

“Pominjali su samo ono što se njih ticalo, samo što je njih tištalo. A tištalo ih je mnogo šta, nestašica, skupoća, strah, velike i male nepravde, prazna obećanja, puste godine, iznevjerene želje, suviše česte noći, rane starosti, male ljubavi, velike mržnje, nesigurnost, poniženja, sav onaj jad što se zove život.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“In the fawning soul of the mob everything is justified by the victorious employment of force. It transfigures treachery, desertion, murder, lying, and any kind of rascality, turning them into wholesome necessities which the servile people accept and swiftly forget as a child does a bitter medicine.”
― Franz Werfel, Jeremias, höret die Stimme

“For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“The mob was engaging in a performative group activity.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“A mob has more tools at its disposal then individual actors do. Popularity—the quantity of clicks of use on any given time is tracked and exploited by algorithms online, and a mob is a critical mass. If thousands of people are linking to something about you, that will quickly become the first thing people see when they google your name, regardless of whether it's a fact checked news article or SmegmaDan69's video about what a bitch you are.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“These pundits are community leaders of the sort—they validate feelings and provide guidance. Internet Inquisitors position themselves as authority figures and truth tellers; they confirm the mob's hatred, paranoia, and insecurities and directed towards the nearest combustible witch on their radar. They serve as morale boosters, assuring the mob that they are correct, that their path is righteous, and that it's the world that's wrong (or in this case, the person they're offering up as a sacrifice).”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Mob mentality rules when people are anxious and scared, and looking for someone to blame for their unhappiness and hurts and fears.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People: The extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece…

“What looks to be the cleanest political party, for a period, will often prove to be the filthiest in the end. Just like any form of corruption, this one plays dirty. It drags its enemies through the mud and scrubs itself clean before morning. It throws rocks and hides its hands. It gains power by all methods but the Truth: on the one hand, by pandering, flattery, and appeasement (quite like Satan, 'the father of lies'); and on the other, by deception and ruthlessness, constantly slinging accusations and smearing its opponents - posing as an angel of light (quite like Satan, 'the accuser') - and doing it hypocritically. It projects, gaslights, intimidates, manipulates, and confuses its subjects into adopting the narrative that it is the intellectually and morally superior party. Believing itself the greater good, and the ends justifying the means, it is able to persist in these things and sleep well doing them. Therefore in the rags of politics, because of this party, it is often the case that individuals painted as villains by the media are heroes in reality.”
― Criss Jami

“The herd is the larger mass, the mindless portion that wanders off the cliff; the mob is the subset and the moshpit that pushes the ones that resist.”
― Criss Jami