The Masses Quotes

“Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing attributes peculiar to the gods of never having to answer for their actions and never making a mistake. Their wishes must be humbly acceded to. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightening cruelties, glorify their hero today and throw him into the gutter tomorrow, it is all the same; the politicians will not cease to vaunt the people's virtues and to bow to their every decision.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution

“Do not be discourage by people who reject your true purpose. Do not stop because of anxiety; stop because you are done with the mission! Don't ever be down by the susurrant call of the masses to stop, halt or abort your true purpose when you are convinced within your innermost man of how true your purpose is. A true purpose is mostly rejected, spat upon and seen as an unworthy cause by the masses until they come to a later realization of how true it is and then they accept, celebrate and enjoy it.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“The advantages of a propaganda that constantly “adds the power of organization” to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“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.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.”
― Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro

“Most men who very seldom say a moral thing, very seldom do a wrong thing. Their immorality is simply a pose, an image that serves to differentiate them from the ‘morally perfect masses’. And as opposite to it, most men who very frequently say a moral thing, very frequently do a wrong thing. Their morality is simply a mask in order to gain the respect of the masses.”
― Elmar Hussein

“Be not be discourage by the rejections. Do not stop because of anxiety; stop because you are done with the mission! Be not be down by the susurrant call of the masses to stop, halt or abort your true purpose when you are convinced within your innermost man of how true your purpose is. A true purpose is mostly to a greater extent rejected, spat upon and seen as unworthy cause by the masses until they come to a later realization of how true it is to be accepted”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“The fall of the protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and the former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and unemployment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they existed in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have supported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second World War.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“In totalitarian anthropology man is not defined by thought, reason or judgment, because, according to it, the overwhelming majority of men lack just these very faculties. Besides, can one speak in terms of man altogether? Decidedly not. For totalitarian anthropology denies the existence of any human essence, single and common to all men. Between one man and "another man" the difference is not one of degree but of kind, says that anthropology. The old Greek definition of man, distinguishing him as the zoon logicon rests on an equivocation: there is no more necessary connection between reason and the word than there is between man, the reasoning animal, and man, the talking animal. For the talking animal is above all the credulous animal, and the credulous animal is by definition one who does not think.

Thought, that is, reason, the ability to distinguish the true from the false, to make decisions and judgments—all this, according to totalitarian anthropology, is very rare. It is the concern of the elite, not of the mob. The mass of men are guided or, more accurately, acted upon, by instinct, passion, sentiments and resentment. The mass do not know how to think nor do they care to. They know only one thing: to obey and believe.”
― Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge

“History is a creative art that makes secret agents in hidden organisations prominent historical figures, at least in the eyes of the masses, in global historical processes.”
― Elmar Hussein

“Patriotism, as a rational choice, is the ideology of the rich, but for the masses this is just an irrational attitude to public life.”
― Elmar Hussein

“In an authoritarian system, the masses suffer from a guilty conscience even when they insist on their rights before the dictator's eyes.”
― Elmar Hussein

“The idea makes the symbol meaningful. The essence of all political, cultural or religious symbols lies in the human mind, without which all of them are merely material things or behavior patterns. Change this idea, and the masses will see completely different meanings in the same material thing or behavior patterns.”
― Elmar Hussein

“The masses must pay for the choices of a few.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“Most of us who were cooperatively bringing out the Masses were agreed upon that. Some channel of protest must be safeguarded for those who had not been stampeded into dumb obeisance to the world's war-makers.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one is right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them … What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls, that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words put into their mildewed brains”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There is always a high barrier between philosophers and the rest in terms of distinctive thinking styles. What is the standard for the rest can be absurd for a philosopher, and vice versa. That is why it is not so easy to penetrate into the mind of a commoner while engaging in philosophy, which in turn can entail the isolation of philosophers in some social environment. Those who are afraid of such isolation can never be a professional philosopher. To be a philosopher means to follow your way of thought, regardless of reaction of the masses.”
― Elmar Hussein

“Rough going had been encountered by the Masses in its efforts to remain a medium for free interpretation in a time of hysteria. Because of its pitiless reporting in trying to reveal true causes, its lack of respect for commercialized religion, and its attacks on sex taboos in art and literature, the magazine had earlier been barred from the reading rooms of many libraries, ousted from the subway and elevated news stands in New York, and refused by distributing companies of Boston and Philadelphia; and our right to use the mails in Canada had been revoked by the Dominion government”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times

“What is called freedom of thought in a large number of cases amounts to—and even for all practical purposes consists of—the ability to choose between two or more different views presented by the small minority of people who are public speakers or writers. If this choice is prevented, the only kind of intellectual independence of which many people are capable is destroyed, and that is the only freedom of thought which is of political importance.”
― Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing

“The corporate controlled government engages in a wide range of frauds with the masses.”
― Steven Magee