Quotes about mass (1874 quotes, page 19)

“By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;—and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Life , Men

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

Fight , Love , Fear , Problem

“I suffer the mortification of seeing myself attacked right and left by people at home professing patriotism and love of country who never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet. I pity them and the nation dependent on such for its existence. I am thankful, however, that though such people make a great noise the masses are not like them.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Letter to his sister Mary (15 December 1862) https://books.google.com/books?id=mUjQAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA505
1860s

Home , Hostility , Country , Dependency

“Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. By Soren Kierkegaard, 1846 edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1978 Princeton University Press P. 21
1840s, Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846)

Silence , Time , Decision

“I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?”

Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

Quoted by Lawrence Wilkerson in Breaking Ranks Larry Wilkerson Attacked the Iraq War. In the Process, He Lost the Friendship of Colin Powell. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2006/01/19/breaking-ranks-span-classbankheadlarry-wilkerson-attacked-the-iraq-war-in-the-process-he-lost-the-friendship-of-colin-powellspan/d1f359c6-93a0-41c1-beee-2284d6284d47/ Washington Post, by Richard Lei (19 January 2006)
2000s

“How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe. Out of different masses, tight, heavy, middling - indicated by variations of size or color - directional line - vectors which represent speeds, velocities, accelerations, forces, etc...”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

these directions making between them meaningful angles, and senses, together defining one big conclusion or many. Spaces, volumes, suggested by the smallest means in contrast to their mass, or even including them, juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds. Nothing at all of this is fixed. Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life. Not extractions, but abstractions. Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.
1930s, How Can Art Be Realized? (1932)

Universe , Color , Speed , Art

“It is true that our collective military strength has been a deterrent to communist aggression. It is equally true, now that both sides possess the means of mass annihilation, that military might alone will not solve our problems or protect us from encirclement.”

Paul Hellyer (1923–2021) engineer, politician, writer

Problem

“The Aquarian Conspiracy is also working to ease hunger—for meaning, connection, completion. And each of us is "the whole project," the nucleus of a critical mass, a steward of the world's transformation.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Thirteen, The Whole- Earth Conspiracy

World , Hunger

“When we talked about Danish novels, it was as if we had in mind a vague impression of Dostoyevsky and those other story-tellers who appear to have spilled a great mass of tar which then, obeying only the laws of gravity, somehow oozes along formlessly into every crack and crevice.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Appearance , Law

“I am not antagonistic to the rightful claims of capital; I am far from wanting to flourish a hostile flag; but I am of opinion that the masses, too, have rights which should be considered.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

Speech to the Reichstag (14 June 1882), quoted in W. H. Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism: An Exposition of the Social and Economic Legislation of Germany since 1870 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), p. 32
1880s

Hostility

“Of course, working people ultimately cannot rely upon the federal government or the state governments (whose purpose is to maintain the hegemony of the markets and the rule of capital) to fix this crisis in any equitable way. Only the working class has the power to make this happen through mass strikes and work actions. In order to act swiftly in the case of any layoffs, lockouts, or shutdowns, working people ultimately must organize themselves at their workplaces and in the streets, whether they are in a union or not, and be prepared to use their collective power to demand that all necessary resources be employed for the well being of the whole class with full compensation and benefits, that full back pay be provided to all workers upon returning to work, and that everyone has access to well compensated employment.”

James Dennis Hoff

Freeze Layoffs: Make the Capitalists Pay (March 23, 2020)

Way , Making love , People

“At the very point when a privileged fraction of the working class seems to be in a position to acquire multiple skills, to achieve workplace autonomy and continually widen their capacities for action - all of which are things that were ideals of the worker self-management currents within the labour movement - the meaning of this ideal is thus radically altered by the conditions in which it seems destined to be fulfilled. It is not the working class which is achieving these possibilities of self-organization and increasing technological power; it is a small core of privileged workers who are integrated into new-style enterprises at the expense of a mass of people who are marginalized and whose job security is destroyed -people shunted from one form of occasional, unrewarding and uninteresting employment to another, who are often reduced to competing for the privilege of selling personal services (including shoe-shining and house-cleaning) to those who retain a secure income.”

André Gorz (1923–2007) austrian philosopher

pp, 70-71 https://books.google.com/books?id=WbpvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA70
Critique of Economic Reason, 1988

Housing , Personality , People , Self-confidence

“The image of the enterprise as a place where employees can achieve personal fulfilment is therefore an essentially ideological invention. It conceals the real transformations that have taken place, namely that enterprises are replacing labour by machines, producing more and better with a decreasing percentage of the workforce previously employed, and offering privileges to a chosen elite of workers, which are accompanied by unemployment, precarious employment, de-skilling and lack of job security for the majority. The advance of technology has thus resulted in the segmentation and disintegration of the working class. An elite has been won over to collaboration with capital in the name of work ethic; the great mass of workers have become marginalized or lost their job security and serve as a reserve army for industry which wishes to be able to adjust its workforce rapidly according to fluctuations in demand.”

André Gorz (1923–2007) austrian philosopher

p. 66 https://books.google.com/books?id=WbpvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66
Critique of Economic Reason, 1988

Personality

“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

Noam Chomsky book Class Warfare

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, Class Warfare, 1995

Education , Thinking , People

“When healthy animals, whose prospects include the possibility of lives that are worth living, are killed, then they suffer the loss of those prospects, even if they do not suffer pain or anxiety in the killing process. So, the mass killing or "slaughter" of animals for food always involves mass suffering. If the phrase "humane slaughter" is supposed to indicate a killing process without suffering, it is a false label.”

Steve F. Sapontzis (1945)

" Morals, Reason and Animals: Steve Sapontzis Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan https://web.archive.org/web/20100114161007/http:/www.abolitionist-online.com/08_steve_sapontzis.shtml", Abolitionist Online (2009)

Loss , Pain , Food , Suffering

“No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition ISBN 9781250062581, p. 3
No Place to Hide (2014)

Fear

“Slavery to State and men has disappeared only to make room for slavery to things and Self, to one's own vices and idiotic social customs and ways. Rapid civilization, adapted to the needs of the higher and middle classes, has doomed by contrast to only greater wretchedness the starving masses.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book The Key to Theosophy

The Key to Theosophy (1889)

Way , Self-confidence , Making love , Men

“Some people (cabal members) who thought that they had a monopoly over truth and over wisdom found that the masses didn’t agree with them…These people are now confused …and want to say that they’re the repository of the entire truth and everything else is false consciousness.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

Swapan Dasgupta, a Rajya Sabha MP, in reference to the Lutyens’ cabal, had stated in a debate at Jaipur Literature Festival 2017, https://www.opindia.com/2020/04/lutyens-media-freedom-of-expression-siddharth-varadarajan-arnab-goswami-sonia-gandhi/

Truth , Falseness , People , Wisdom

“For the upper classes all periods in history have been golden; for the masses none.”

D. N. Jha (1940) Indian historian

quoted from Arun Shourie (2014) Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. HarperCollins

History

“What is the use of talking of Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to be found a mass of people stunted in education, prey to intemperance, huddled and congested beyond the possibility of realising in any true sense either social or domestic life”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Jenkins R, Mr. Balfour s Poodle, p.11
Undated

Sense , Education , Life , People

“The Dalits were the original inhabitants of India and resemble the African in physical features. It is said that India and Africa were one land-mass until separated by the ocean. So both the Africans and the Indian Untouchables had common ancestors.”

V. T. Rajshekar (1932) Indian conspiracy theorist

V.T. Rajshekar: Dalit - the Black Untouchables of India, Clarity Press, Atlanta 1987, p.43. , quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate https://web.archive.org/web/20100412074243/http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ait/ New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

“Dinosaurs, Neanderthals, and Denisovans did not evolve and adapt fast enough, and therefore they became extinct. Modus operandi or business as usual will doom the human race to mass extinction.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

Business

“As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, the danger is colossal. All nations should declare... that nuclear weapons must be destroyed. This is to save ourselves and our planet.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Quoted in https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-50265870/mikhail-gorbachev-tells-the-bbc-world-in-colossal-danger Mikhail Gorbachev tells the BBC: World in ‘colossal danger’, BBC World News,(4 November 2019)
2000s

“The broad mass is feminine.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw, Page iii.
Other remarks

“Since December 2015, there have 10 incidents that killed 10 or more people. That’s more than there was in 30 years between 1982 and 2011. And five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history have all happened in the last five years.”

Nate Silver (1978) American statistician and writer

August 11, 2019 on ABC's This Week (['This Week' Transcript 8-11-19, ABC News, August 11, 2019, This Week, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-11-19-sen-cory-booker/story?id=64908165])
2010s, 2019

People , History

“Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all.”

Steven Best (1955) American activist

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 3 "The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action" (p. 78)

Life , Failure

“You change the world not through some all-encompassing ideology or mass religious conversion or misplaced dreams of the future, but by achieving the maturation and dignity of each individual in the present, here and now.”

Mark Manson book Everything Is Fucked

World , Future , Dreams , Change

“If we are only organizing for elections, we are not going to win the world that we need...No one politician is the answer. No one president is the answer. You are the answer, mass movements are the answer.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

via tweet https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324895073776054273 on November 6, 2020
Twitter Quotes (2020), November 2020

World

“What is new today is not globalization as such—we are too late for that. Rather, what is unique to our times is the widespread awareness of global processes among increasingly fragmented populations. That awareness grows everywhere, largely because of the increase in both the size and the velocity of global flows. Capital, populations, and information move in much greater mass and at increasing speed. At the same time, most human beings continue to act locally.

Thus, we are witnessing the rise of what I call "a fragmented globality."”

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) Haitian academic and anthropologist

World histories and local histories are at once becoming both increasingly intertwined and increasingly contradictory. The twenty-first century is likely to be marked by the speed and brutality of these contradictions.
Theorizing a Global Perspective (1996)

Time , Speed

“To demonize all Soviet "leaders" at all levels, to portray them as unqualified villains and evildoers, unprincipled self-seeking scoundrels who were indifferent to the interests and needs of the people — that is a shallow and frivolous approach. Of course there were villains, quite a few of them. But most of those who came to power had the intention of serving the "toiling masses" from which they themselves had come. That the system rendered their aspirations useless, reduced their efforts to nothing, and ultimately snuffed out their finer impulses — that is a separate question.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Question , Indifference , People , Self-confidence

“I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. 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. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World (1932), Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16

Imagination , Reading , Time , War

“I have always looked upon the interests of the labouring classes as essentially the most conservative interests of the country. The rights of labour have been to me always as sacred as the rights of property, and I have always thought that those who were most interested in the stability and even in the glory of a State are the great mass of the population, happy to enjoy the privileges of freemen under good laws, and proud at the same time of the country which confers on its inhabitants a name of honour and of glorious reputation in every quarter of the globe.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in Edinburgh (30 October 1867), quoted in The Chancellor of the Exchequer in Scotland; Being Two Speeches Delivered by Him in the City of Edinburgh on 29th and 30th October, 1867 (1867), pp. 36-37

Time , Law , Country , Happiness

“The hardest thing about making a vaccine is mass-producing it. You have to have the right buffering agent, the right stabilizing agent. You have to have the right vial. You have to do real-time stability studies to make sure that when the vaccine leaves the manufacturing plant, that the time it takes to get from the tarmac to the person's arm does not cause any problems. Because, remember, when you're shipping vaccines, they're going to be exposed to high temperatures and low temperatures, and you have to make sure that you have a stable product.”

Paul Offit (1951) American immunologist

Paul Offit (2020) cited in " This Is How We'll Vaccinate the World Against COVID-19 https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/this-is-how-well-vaccinate-the-world-against-covid19" on IEEE Spectrum, 15 December 2020.

Study , Time , Personality , Problem

“It is now becoming recognised in all parts of the world that there can be no healthy Christian State, in any country, where poverty exists amongst the masses of the people.”

Timothy Quill (1901–1960) Early Dáil member, cooperative organiser, agriculturalist

The Kerryman (1937)
By Quill:, 1930s

World , People , Parting , Country

“Influence without control is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Isaac Mashman (2000) businessman, speaker

“It is the universal hope of rising in the social scale which is the key to much of the superiority that is visible in this country. It accounts for the orderly self-respect which is the great characteristic of the masses in the United States. ... All this tends to the argument that the political condition of a people is very much dependent on its economical fate.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to John Bright during his visit to the United States (1858), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden [1879] (1905), p. 688
1850s

Universe , Self-confidence , Country , Dependency

“I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

The Marshall Plan Speech (1947)

Peace , Country , Intelligence , People

“I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

Radio talk, 22 May, 1942
Wilderness Years (1941-1949)

Home , Fashion , Life , Children

“Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed, or country, and the resolute preference of the interests of the whole to any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Sir John Cowan (17 March 1894), quoted in The Times (22 March 1894), p. 8
1890s

Love , Making love , Time , Country

“We live in a world of instant communication and the amount of information that comes our way can be overwhelming. The questions of what’s important in life, what is life-giving etc. can often be missed. So my message is simple, and it sometimes comes up at Mass: "Judge wisely the things of earth and measure them against the values of heaven."”

George Stack (1946) Irish Roman Catholic archbishop

Heart Talk : Archbishop George Stack https://www.shalomworld.org/episode/archbishop-george-stack (4 March 2018)

World , Question , Way , Life

“Armed with Marxist-Leninist theory and ideology, the Communist Party of China has brought a new style of work to the Chinese people, a style of work that essentially entails integrating theory with practice, forging close links with the masses and practicing self-criticism.”

Mao Zedong book On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

(zh-CN) 以马克思列宁主义的理论思想武装起来的中国共产党，在中国人民中产生了新的工作作风，这主要的就是理论和实践相结合的作风，和人民群众紧密地联系在一起的作风以及自我批评的作风。
1950s, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957)

People

“We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

(zh-CN) 我们应当相信群众，我们应当相信党，这是两条根本的原理。如果怀疑这两条原理，那就什么事情也做不成了。
On the Question of Agricultural Co-Operation (July 31, 1955)
1950s

Faith

“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

My Religion (1884), Ch. 12

Light , Communication , Truth , Error

“Whoever tries to stop the saying of mass is a worse fanatic than the priest who says it.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Attacking the Dechristianization movement
Misc Quotes

“You try to cope with the mass audience, but in fact you are not doing something for them—I would be fighting with myself. I thought, I don’t have to make big films, I can make small films that I can be happy with. I can find my own audience.”

Wong Kar-wai (1958) Hong Kong screenwriter, film producer and film director

"Wong Kar-wai by Han Ong" in Bomb Magazine (1 Janaury 1998) https://bombmagazine.org/articles/wong-kar-wai-1/

Happiness , Fight

“We are finally achieving a mass consciousness. We're seeing a widespread awareness and commitment to anti-racism that we have long needed. People are now alert and active because the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected our lives are.”

Opal Tometi (1984) Nigerian–American writer, strategist and community organizer

Black Lives Matter Was Always Designed to Be a Global Movement, Vice] (7 July 2020)

People

“I call on the U.S.A. to be with us. It’s very important when a regime is destroying everything in Belarus, destroying mass media, destroying all the organizations, it’s extremely important to support all those people.”

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (1982) Belarusian politician and educator

"Belarusian Opposition Leader Hopes to Spur Action During Washington Visit" in Voice of America https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_belarusian-opposition-leader-hopes-spur-action-during-washington-visit/6208416.html (19 July 2021)

Support , People

“I probably was the one out of the three of us that was like, ‘Let’s go, let’s get big, let’s get everybody.’ I wasn’t necessarily thinking about organizational structure... I was mostly thinking about building a mass movement that people can be a part of and feel an identity around.”

Opal Tometi (1984) Nigerian–American writer, strategist and community organizer

How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next, By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone, (16 June 2020)

People , Thinking , Feeling , Parting

“People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer fucntion.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"Letters from Zedelghem", p. 470
Cloud Atlas (2004), Letters from Zedelghem (Part 2)

Music , People

“I am an ordinary Communist, a little pupil of Chairman Mao, and a little pupil of the broad masses. I have to learn from my dear comrades.”

Jiang Qing (1914–1991) Chinese political figure and wife of Mao Zedong

Source: Speech at the Reception for the Representatives of the Beijing Workers Propaganda Team and the People's Liberation Army Propaganda Team (14 September 1968)

Learning

“Don’t be scared to live your faith. When I was young and went on my first trip I was hesitant to speak up and say that I wanted to go to Mass. When I stuck to it and showed that I lived my faith I got respect from my teammates.”

Rebecca Dussault (1980) American cross-country skier

Faith, Family and the Slopes: An Interview with Rebecca Dussault https://catholicexchange.com/faith-family-and-the-slopes-an-interview-with-rebecca-dussault (4 May 2016)

Faith

“For the Chinese national revolution to succeed, the participation of the masses of all classes and the building of a united front of all classes are necessary. But among the classes taking part in the national revolution, the working class and the peasantry constitute the main force.”

Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) 2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898-1969)

Source: "Mr. Liao Zhongkai and Worker and Peasant Policy" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1926/09/26.htm (26 September 1926)

Parting

“We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event - the sixth in our planet's history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.”

Jason Hickel (1982) author

Source: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021), Welcome to the Anthropocene, p. 8

History , Time

“Calling socialism, under which the popular masses are the masters of everything, "totalitarianism" is, ultimately, a preposterous lie which identifies the most progressive idea that reflects the demands of the popular masses with the reactionary idea of fascist rulers.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

Source: "Abuses of socialism are intolerable," article in Central Committee magazine Kulloja (March 1, 1993)

Idea , Lie

“Where there’s a will there’s a way. We have the will to world revolution, therefore we must find the way to reach the masses of the exploited and the enslaved women, whether the historical conditions make it easy or difficult.”

Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) German politician

Source: As quoted in Fourth Congress of the Communist International https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1922/ci/women.htm, marxists.org, November 1922.

World , Way , Women

“The way we practice religion today poses security problem in the country. If we take holiness serious, we will be able to tackle the problem of bombings in the country. There should be no sacred cows in the society. Everybody should look for the common good of the masses.”

Ayo-Maria Atoyebi (1944)

Source: Probe retired generals, Catholic Bishop urges Jonathan https://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/05/probe-retired-generals-catholic-bishop-urges-jonathan/ (21 May 2012)

Religion , Country , Problem , Way

“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.”

Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) French psychologist

Source: Psychologie des Foules [The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind] (1895)

Truth

“It is known that very distant nebulae, probably galactic systems like our own, show remarkably high receding velocities whose magnitude increases with the distance. This curious phenomenon promises to provide some important clues for the future development of our cosmological views. It maybe of advantage, therefore, to point out some of the principal facts which any cosmological theory will have to account for. Then a brief discussion will be given of different theoretical suggestions related to the above effect. Finally, a new effect of masses upon light will be suggested which is a sort of gravitational analogue of the Compton effect.”

Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) Swiss astronomer

Source: Fritz Zwicky, [On the redshift of spectral lines through interstellar space, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 15, 10, 1929, 773–779, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC522555/] (quote from p. 773)

Light , Distant , Future

“When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character. I was at Harvard doing research on this subject, and I felt like I had a lot of information, but I had not yet found my story because I had to realize that I am a novelist. I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not an ethnographer. And I found the story, actually, through eavesdropping…”

Tayari Jones (1970) American writer

Source: On how she chose the topic of mass incarceration for her novel An American Marriage in “If I Can’t Cry, Nobody Cries: An Interview with Tayari Jones” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/08/cant-cry-nobody-cries-interview-tayari-jones/ in The Paris Review (2018 Feb 8)

Books , Thinking

“Mass schooling damages children. We don’t need any more of it. And under the guise that it is the same thing as education, it has been picking our pockets just as Socrates predicted it would thousands of years ago. One of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn’t cost very much, doesn’t depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the Mass schooling that propels it are nearly free. It is hard to turn a dollar on education. But schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 70

Dependency , Children , Education , School

“Those who seek to influence us always work on our individualities, either trying to stifle them with mass hypnotism or to spur them to life with such cries as 'Democracy!’ ... or fulfilment under some other name.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter I, Secrets Behind History

Democracy , Life

“Cultural work naturally must serve the cause of the People’s Democratic revolution and only then will it benefit the masses. It is most important in cultural work not to ignore the national traditions in form and to maintain its class character in content.”

Kyūichi Tokuda (1894–1953) Japanese politician

New Situation and the Policy of the Communist Party of Japan (1950)

People , Nature

“Faith I have, in myself, in humanity, in the worthwhileness of the pursuits in entertainment for the masses. But wide awake, not blind faith, moves me. My operations are based on experience, thoughtful observation and warm fellowship with my neighbors at home and around the world.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in The Gospel According to Disney : Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust (2004) by Mark I. Pinsky, p. 20
Year unknown, published in 2004

Home , World , Faith

“What is democracy? True democracy means the holding of power by the laboring masses. Are laborers unqualified to hold power? Yugoslavia has taken this road and proved to us that even without dictatorial rulers, big or small, the people can work even better.”

Wei Jingsheng (1950) Chinese democracy activist and dissident

The Fifth Modernization (1978) (excerpts)

Democracy , People

“[M]y friends and I are totally at a loss to understand the new form of the Mass... Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Letter to Archbishop Heenan (3 January 1965), quoted in A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes: Expanded Edition, ed. Alcuin Reid (2001), pp. 69, 71

God , Loss , Understanding

“The effect of the land reform bringing land to the peasant masses is to enhance their enthusiasm and their zeal in increasing production and taking part in the war of resistance, and consequently the resistance forces will grow in strength.”

Trường Chinh (1907–1988) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907-1988)

Implementing the Land Reform (1958) (excerpts)

War , Parting

“Now the mass of mankind are plainly... choosing a life like that of brute animals...”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

The Ethics Of Aristotle (Vol. I), Bk. 1, Chapter III

Life , Animals

“We are syndicalists, because we think that by means of the mass it may be possible to determine an economic readjustment…”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“Fascismo and the Rights of Victory” speech delivered at Florence (9 October 1919) p. 106
1920s, Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches (November 1914—August 1923) (1923)

Thinking

“No nation can become greater in which there are enormous masses condemned to the conditions of life of prehistoric humanity.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“The League of Nations” speech in Milan (20 October 1918), p. 52
1920s, Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches (November 1914—August 1923) (1923)

Life