quotations about mobs
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
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, so that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.
SIGMUND FREUD
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
attributed, Calvin Coolidge: His Ideals of Citizenship as Revealed Through His Speeches and Writings
And now if all mobs are properly frenzies, and work frenetically with mad fits of hot and of cold, fierce rage alternating so incoherently with panic terror, consider what your military mob will be, with such a conflict of duties and penalties, whirled between remorse and fury, and, for the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand!
THOMAS CARLYLE
The Works of Thomas Carlyle
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
Characteristics
Mobs were ugly and vicious but they were also purposeful, congregating around a wound in the populace's psyche like white blood cells around an infection in the body. They were safety valves for frustration and dissatisfaction; they united a population against a real or imagined enemy.
PAUL MCAULEY
The Quiet War
One dog barks at something, and a hundred bark at him.
CHINESE PROVERB
Mobs are multiplied ignorance.
W. JONES
attributed, Day's Collacon
The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
The Piano Teacher
The sight of blood to crowds begets the thirst of more,
As the first wine-cup leads to the long revel.
LORD BYRON
Marino Faliero
A crowd isn't formed after people gather; people gather after the crowd forms.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.
CHARLES DICKENS
Barnaby Rudge
All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
EDMUND BURKE
A Memoir of the Political Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838
The mob is a monster with the hands of Briareus, but the head of Polyphemus--strong to execute, but blind to perceive.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Ten thousand fools, knaves, cowards, lump'd together,
Become all-wise, all-righteous, and all-mighty.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Brothers
A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer