Sunday, August 9, 2009 – Regarding Mobs
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
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions. ~ D. H. Lawrence
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. ~ Thomas Jefferson
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
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 mob has many heads, but no brains. ~ Thomas Fuller
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. ~ Henry Louis Mencken
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
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
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
It is an easy and 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
Mobs are multiplied ignorance. ~ Sir William Jones
The dregs may stir themselves as they please; they fall back to the bottom by their own coarseness. ~ Joseph Joubert
The many-headed multitude, whom inconstancy only doth by accident guide to well-doing! Who can set confidence there, where company takes away shame, and each may lay the fault upon his fellow? ~ Sir Philip Sidney
Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements. ~ Edward Gibbon
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs. ~ John Ruskin
The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny. ~ Edmund Burke
All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals. ~ Joshua Lederberg
Just Above Sunset 