Quotes about crowd
page 3

Everett Dean Martin photo
Ward Cunningham photo
Mallika Sherawat photo
Abraham Cowley photo
Matthew Arnold photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Mahadev Govind Ranade photo

“…from the madding crowd’s ignobale strife.”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

He moved on a plane of his own far removed, quoted in page=489

Anna Sui photo

“To stand out in the crowd I liked the color purple.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

CNN Interview (July 31, 2004)

Bert McCracken photo

“This is a song about the reason we all came down here today, and that's because we (expletive) love music. This is a crowd-surfing song.”

Bert McCracken (1982) American musician

At a concert, commenting to the audience about The Used's song "Burning in the Aftermath", reported in Jason Newell (July 8, 2003) "Teens chill at hot concert", Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

Frederick Douglass photo
Phil Brooks photo

“Punk: Tonight, the Straight-edge Society becomes the first ever Straight-edge World Unified Tag Team Champions. I came out here for a reason, I came out with a purpose. I'm here to lead my crusade, [Crowd chants you suck] and I've brought my disciples, Luke Gallows and the beautiful Serena with me.
Triple H: Punk, I have been watching Smackdown. And I gotta say, while I'm relieved to know that your straight, this whole I don't drink thing, I don't think anybody really gives a crap, do you know what I mean? [Crowd cheers]
Punk: You're looking at three people who give a crap, and don't try to pretend you know anything about me, or you know anything about Straight-edge, or you know anything about my society at all.
Triple H: No, no, no, no, you're right. I don't know anything about it, I don't get it, Punk, that's the thing. I don't get it, I mean you don't drink, you don't do drugs, you don't smoke. Okay, neither do I. But then again, I don't look like I've been on a week long crack binge with Amy Winehouse! [Serena shakes her head, Punk looks pissed] I'm just saying, have a little pride, man. Pick yourself up, clean yourself off. Maybe take them clippers out of the bag, shave that squirrel off you got on your chin. [Punk grabs his beard and mouths off] Hey, do yourself a favor. Grab a shower, cause I don't know if it's you, Lobotomy Man, or Britney Spears right there, but one of you's got a bad case of swamp butt!
Punk: Alright, are you done? Is amateur comedy hour over? Because I came here to claim those tag titles!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

January 29, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo
Harry Turtledove photo

“The crowd of ragged Confederates on the White House lawn had doubled and more since he went in to confer with Lincoln. The trees were full of men who had climbed up so they could see over their comrades. Off in the distance, cannon occasionally still thundered; rifles popped like firecrackers. Lee quietly said to Lincoln, "Will you send out your sentries under flag of truce to bring word of the armistice to those Federal positions still firing upon my men?" "I'll see to it," Lincoln promised. He pointed to the soldiers in gray, who had quieted expectantly when Lee came out. "Looks like you've given me sentries enough, even if their coats are the wrong color." Few men could have joked so with their cause in ruins around them. Respecting the Federal President for his composure, Lee raised his voice: "Soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, after three years of arduous service, we have achieved that for which we took up arms-" He got no further. With one voice, the men before him screamed out their joy and relief. The unending waves of noise beat at him like a surf from a stormy sea. Battered forage caps and slouch hats flew through the air. Soldiers jumped up and down, pounded on one another's shoulders, danced in clumsy rings, kissed each other's bearded, filthy faces. Lee felt his own eyes grow moist. At last the magnitude of what he had won began to sink in.”

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 180

Gabrielle Roy photo
Jerry Cantrell photo

“Jerry Cantrell speaking with the crowd during Alice in Chains' concert at the InMusic Festival in Zagreb, Croatia on June 27, 2018, quoted in”

Jerry Cantrell (1966) American musician and songwriter

https://www.nme.com/news/interpol-offered-a-classy-conclusion-to-a-sensational-inmusic-festival-in-zagreb-2346552, Interpol offered a classy conclusion to a sensational INmusic Festival in Zagreb, NME, June 28, 2018
On Alice in Chains

Charles Lamb photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 5 (p. 42)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“The wretch who on the scaffold stands
Has some brief time allow’d
For parting grasp of kindly hands,
For farewell to the crowd :”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Madeline
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

George W. Bush photo

“I made it very plain: We will not have an all-volunteer army. [Crowd boos] Let me restate that. We will not have a draft.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Crowd Cheers
Bush speaking at the Daytona International Speedway with his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, October 16, 2004 http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041016/nysa024_1.html
2000s, 2004

Plutarch photo
Anna Akhmatova photo

“A multi-colored crowd streaked about,
and suddenly all was totally changed.
It wasn't the usual city racket.
It came from a strange land.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

"The First Long Range Artillery Fire On Leningrad," translation by Daniela Gioseffi (1993) http://users.tellurian.net/wisewomensweb/OnPrgudc.html

Ludovico Ariosto photo

“One man saluted him, another bowed,
Some kissed his hand, still others kissed his foot;
Whoever touched him, joyful was and proud,
For supernatural he seemed, if not
Divine; jostling around him in a crowd,
As close as possible the Bulgars got,
And clamoured for him raucously and cried
To be their king, their captain and their guide.”

Uno il saluta, un altro se gl'inchina,
Altri la mano, altri gli bacia il piede:
Ognun, quanto più può, se gli avvicina,
E beato si tien chi appresso il vede,
E più chi 'l tocca; che toccar divina
E sopranatural cosa si crede.
Lo pregan tutti, e vanno al ciel le grida,
Che sia lor re, lor capitan, lor guida.
Canto XLIV, stanza 97 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

John Maynard Keynes photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
Snoop Dogg photo

“I had to shake the spot cause the game got crowded
I'm devoted and quote it, I'm rowdy and bout it
A No Limit Soldier, and happy to shout it.”

Snoop Dogg (1971) American rapper, singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

"Get Bout It & Rowdy", Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told (1998).

Lewis Mumford photo
Willa Cather photo
Mario Bunge photo
Pricasso photo

“Wearing silver boots and a hat, armbands and a smile, he whipped out his paintbrush, so to speak, and in 20 minutes painted pictures of his customers with a flourish - while a fascinated crowd gathered, some gaping in disbelief.”

Pricasso (1949) Australian painter

[Barbara Cole, Putting fun back into sex, Daily News, South Africa, 8 February 2008, 5, Independent Online]
About

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Claude McKay photo

“I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools”

Claude McKay (1889–1948) Jamaican American writer, poet

Complete Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p. 348

Phil Brooks photo

“Okay, I get it. You people destroy billions of brain cells on a daily basis with your excess consumption of alcoholic beverages, over-the-counter as well as prescription medication—the latter of which, chances are, aren't even yours—and a veritable laundry list of substances that you shove into your soft little bodies day after day. The reason I bring up your chemically-induced mind is because I think the lot of you have forgotten my accomplishments, so please allow me to jog your ailing memory: I am the only three-time straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in WWE history, I am the only Superstar in WWE history to win back-to-back Money in the Bank Ladder Matches at WrestleMania, and don't forget I am the man that did you, the WWE Universe, a favor that you didn't even deserve when I got rid of the Charismatic Enabler Jeff Hardy from this company…forever. But that runs a close #2 to my crowning achievement of using my Anaconda Vice and, for the first time, making the Undertaker [makes the motion on his chest] tap out—I did that. Me. I did that, and I did it all without drugs, I did it all without alcohol, and above all else, I did it all without any help from any of you. So I want somebody, anybody in a position of power to come out here right now and treat me with the respect I have earned, not only as the face of SmackDown, but the poster boy of the entire company, and as the choice of a new generation, I deserve to know who my next opponent is now that I have defeated the all-powerful Undertaker. [Waits amidst the boos of the crowd] Oh, that's right. There isn't anybody left!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 25, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Fernand Léger photo
Josh Homme photo

“I want God to come and take me home, 'cause I'm all alone in this crowd.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"The Vampyre of Time and Memory", ...Like Clockwork (2013)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

Godfrey Higgins photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Bea Arthur photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Howard Bloom photo

“Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.8 Reality is a Shared Hallucination

Steve Kilbey photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“I also don't think it's unsophisticated to think of God the Father as the spirit that arises from the crowd that exists into the future. You make sacrifices in the present so that the future is happy with you. The question is, then, what is that future that would be happy with you? It's the spirit of humanity. That's who you're negotiating with, because you make the assumption that if you forgo impulsive pleasure and get your medical degree, that when you're done in ten years and when you're a physician, humanity as such will honor your sacrifice and commitment, and it will open the doors to you. So you're treating the future as if it's a single being, and you're also treating it as if it's a compassionate judge. You're acting that out. And maybe, once we figured out that there is a future, we needed to imagine God in that form in order to concretize something that we could bargain with so that we could figure out how to use sacrifice so that we could guide ourselves into the future. Because if sacrifice is a contract with the future, but not with any particular person, then it is a contract with the spirit of humanity as such. It's something like that. To come up with the idea that you can bargain with the future is THE major idea of humankind. We suffer. What do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future. And we minimize suffering in that manner.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

“In Freud's crowd, the individuals fasten on an object, substitute it for their ego ideal, and all those with the same ego ideal identify themselves with each other in their ego. Remove the object and you get anxiety.”

George Goodman (1930–2014) American author and economics commentator

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 4, Is the Market Really A Crowd?, p. 49

Benjamin J. Davis Jr. photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
George Bird Evans photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Philo photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Henry Adams photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Nick Drake photo

“And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets
So crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning?”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

Hazey Jane II
Song lyrics, Bryter Later (1970)

Statius photo

“So in the dark of night a dense crowd of shepherds wards off a wolf from the steer he has caught.”
Sic densa lupum jam nocte sub atra arcet ab apprenso pastorum turba juvenco.

Source: Thebaid, Book VIII, Line 691

Niccolo Machiavelli photo
Amir Taheri photo

“The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

David Foster Wallace photo
Joni Mitchell photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Margaret Mead photo
Leo Ryan photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Chris Hedges photo

“Moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, and to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

26:50
“ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

Aldo Capitini photo
Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo
Damian Pettigrew photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 60 et seq.

This is a reference to Dante's Inferno, Canto III, lines 55-57

Anthony Watts photo
John Bright photo
Jean Cocteau photo

“Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988), On Invisibility

Leo Tolstoy photo
Henry Hazlitt photo

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Robert Erskine Childers photo
Tom Petty photo

“There's rain on the road
And the faithful have gone.
In a crowd all alone,
Walking 'round in a song.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Damaged By Love
Lyrics, Highway Companion (2006)

Robert LeFevre photo
André Maurois photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Albert Gleizes photo

“People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

Quote of Gleizes, 1911, on the Paris' 'Salon d'Automne' exhibition of 1911; as cited by Anne Ganteführer-Trier, in 'Cubism, Taschen, 2004
1910s

Sathya Sai Baba photo
Fitz-Greene Halleck photo
Wallace Stevens photo

“In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

Auguste Rodin photo
Statius photo

“Even so a crowd of nestlings, seeing their mother returning through the air afar, would fain go to meet her, and lean gaping from the edge of the nest, and would even now be falling, did she not spread all her motherly bosom to save them, and chide them with loving wings.”
Volucrum sic turba recentum, cum reducem longo prospexit in aere matrem, ire cupit contra summique e margine nidi extat hians, iam iamque cadat, ni pectore toto obstet aperta parens et amantibus increpat alis.

Source: Thebaid, Book X, Line 458 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Louis-ferdinand Céline photo

“And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you can remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd. We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter's breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at the carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we're sitting down aren't we? Which ain't to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joy of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud…taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they're shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldier too, and the town hall with its flag. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.”

27
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

Phil Brooks photo

“So all you people here, despite evidence to the contrary, still choose to support a man that for all intents and purposes can't even support himself? OK, OK, so if you're a Jeff Hardy fan, if you're wearing a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, if you're wearing one of his diabolical little handsleeves, God forbid if you have your face painted, I want to see you stand up right now. I want to hear you make some noise! Go ahead, if you love and support Jeff Hardy, let the world know! (Crowd cheers, stands up.) Cameraman, cameraman get a good shot, get a real good shot at all these people. The truth is ladies and gentlemen, I don't blame you. I don't blame anybody here for supporting Jeff Hardy. The people I blame, are their parents. Or let's be realistic here, I said parents, what I should have said was parent. Because it's obviously a single parent situation, just like the way Jeff Hardy grew up. See you people are so concerned with the relationship with your children failing, just like your marriage did, that you acquiesce to their every whim and their every desire. I hate to tell you, this doesn't make you a good parent, Philadelphia, it makes you an enabler. (Crowd boos. Starts chanting for Hardy.) And the fact that you even let your children look up to a guy like Jeff Hardy, just shows that you really don't care what happens to them to begin with. It's a sad situation. So I don't blame anybody here or sitting at home watching this, that supports Jeff Hardy if they're under 17, because they're young and they're, well, they're impressionable. The real problem lies with the parents, it's the parents who don't make a conscious effort to sit their children down and teach them the proper way to live! (Crowd boos.) You see it starts with a Jeff Hardy t-shirt, next thing you know they're smoking a pack of cigarettes, after that, they're drinking a bottle of beer. Right after that they move on to shots of Jack Daniels, which is a gateway drug for marijuana…(Crowd pops for marijuana.) And the fact that you people sit here and cheer that goes to show that I'm telling the truth! How about some old fashioned street drugs? And before you know it they're digging through Mom's purse because they're addicted, they're addicted to prescription medication. (Crowd cheers, Punk mouths,"That's not cool!" to fans.) All of this can be stopped before it's too late! Parents, all you have to do is talk to your children. Sit them down and show them the way, tell them the words that can save their lives, show them that sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you who you are! For weeks, for weeks I've been saying to people like you, just say no. But today I think we should just say yes. Yes to the future of a straight edge, drug free America! Just say yes to the winner of tonight's match, just say yes, to the World Heavyweight Champion! Thank you!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

At Night of Champions 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Louis Sullivan photo
Martin Amis photo
Diana, Princess of Wales photo

“Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

Responding to the question "Do you think Mrs Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage?" in an interview with Martin Bashir http://www.bbc.co.uk/politics97/diana/panorama.html on BBC Panorama (20 November 1995)

Samuel R. Delany photo
Alice Cary photo
Brad Paisley photo
Anthony Bourdain photo