Gustave Le Bon Quotes Page 2


 
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Best 51 Quotes by Gustave Le Bon – Page 2 of 2

The Crowd Quotes

“Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.”

The Crowd

“It is time in particular that prepares the opinions and beliefs of crowds, or at least the soil on which they will germinate.”

The Crowd

“Many can easily do without truths, but no one is strong enough to do without illusions.”

The Crowd

“Science has promised us truth... It has never promised us either peace or happiness.”

The Crowd

“Sentiment has never been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason.”

The Crowd

“The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.”

The Crowd

“The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.”

The Crowd

“The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.”

The Crowd

“The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.”

The Crowd

“The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.”

The Crowd

“The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.”

The Crowd

“The influence of the leaders is due in very small measure to the arguments they employ, but in a large degree to their prestige. The best proof of this is that, should they by any circumstance lose their prestige, their influence disappears.”

The Crowd

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

The Crowd

“The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question.”

The Crowd

“The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.”

The Crowd

“This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence.”

The Crowd

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“What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of a piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars.

The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom. He will endeavor to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home. This he may do, for example, by organizing an exhibition of period music rooms designed by well-known decorators who themselves exert an influence on the buying groups. Then, in order to create dramatic interest in the exhibit, he stages an event or ceremony. To this ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society leader, are invited. These key persons affect other groups, lifting the idea of the music room to a place in the public consciousness which it did not have before. The juxtaposition of these leaders, and the idea which they are dramatizing, are then projected to the wider public through various publicity channels.

The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.”


More quotes by Edward Bernays

“To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act.”

The Crowd

“Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.”

The Crowd

“Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being and is subject to the law of the mental unity of crowds.”

The Crowd

“We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”

The Crowd

The Psychology of Socialism Quotes

“Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?”

The Psychology of Socialism
 
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