Mob Rule

Sunday, October 31, 2021 – Mob Rule 

It is an easy and a vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them, is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands? ~ George Eliot

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them. ~ William Hazlitt

There is nothing more odious than the majority; it consists of a few powerful men to lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and of a mass of men who trot after them, without in the least knowing their mind. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men’s rights are nothing more. Women’s rights are nothing less. ~ Susan B. Anthony

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs. ~ John Ruskin

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place. ~ Jerry Garcia

Whoever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs? No – no, your lean, hungry men who are continually worrying society, and setting the whole community by the ears. ~ Washington Irving

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. ~ Oscar Wilde

Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines. ~ Paul Brunton

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. ~ Hannah Arendt

The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? ~ Henry Miller

The American people, taken one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages. ~ H. L. Mencken

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. ~ H. L. Mencken

The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization. ~ Calvin Coolidge

The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you. ~ Jane Porter

You will never escape the will of the mob; about the best anyone has ever figured out how to do is herd them into voting booths. ~ Barry Shein

Get together a hundred or two men, however sensible they may be, and you are very likely to have a mob. ~ Samuel Johnson

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labor in your fields and serve in your houses – that man your navy, and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob; but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people. ~ Lord Byron

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country. ~ Andrew Johnson

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness… I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country. ~ Eric Cantor, 2011

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread. ~ B. F. Skinner, Walden Two

You can’t fight hatred with hatred and expect anyone to listen to you. You can only try to lessen it with humor, wit, truth and commonsense. If that doesn’t work run like hell, while they throw rocks at you. ~ Shannon L. Alder

A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone. ~ C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions. ~ D. H. Lawrence