Gustave Le Bon Quotes

“A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.”

“A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.”

“A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts. Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.”

“A person's words never reveal his true personality: only his actions reveal it, sometimes even to himself.”

“All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.”

“At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of a hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.”

“Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige.”

“Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas.”

“Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.”

“Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs.”

“In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.”

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.”

“In the case of everything that belongs to the realm of sentiment, religion, politics, morality, the affections, and antipathies, etc. The most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”