Quotes about mass
page 9

Frederick E. Morgan photo
Victor Frederick Weisskopf photo
Donald Barthelme photo
Rudolf Höss photo
Enver Hoxha photo

“How many members of the fleshbound masses do you think will listen to him? He’s making sense, and they don’t respond to that.”

Bradley Denton (1958) American science fiction author

Source: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991), p. 121

“The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the enslaved — to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stagnant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!
Divine task! immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country.”

Address to the U.S. Senate (2 March 1846); quoted in Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (1873), by William Gilpin, p. 124.

Hugh Iltis photo
Dylan Moran photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Horace Greeley photo

“The masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has so long divided them.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

Acceptance of Liberal Republican nomination as President (29 May 1872)
1870s

Barbara Hepworth photo
Dianne Feinstein photo
Raymond Loewy photo

“I believe one should design for the advantage of the largest mass of people, first and always. That takes care of ideologies and sociologies.”

Raymond Loewy (1893–1986) industrial designer

Raymond Loewy, cited in: William Marling (1998) The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. p. 279

Adam Roberts photo
Ali Shariati photo
Laurie Penny photo

“All you need is a hell of an aperceptive mass, an IQ of 150, and a dollop of ESP, and you can ignore the headlines, because you anticipated them months ago.”

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

Source: The Money Game (1968), Chapter 3, Can Ink Blots Tell You..., p. 40

John Gray photo
Joseph Strutt photo

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

John F. Kerry photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Eric Hoffer photo

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

Section 65, Ch.14 Unifying Agents
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

Joseph Goebbels photo
Narendra Modi photo
Paul Watson photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Willem de Sitter photo

“In Einstein's general theory of relativity the identity of these two coefficients, the gravitational and the inertial mass, is no longer a miracle, but a necessity, because gravitation and inertia are identical.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Thomas Henry Huxley photo
John Dewey photo
Greg Egan photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Peter Tatchell photo

“Debates and parliamentary divisions are fruitless cosmetic exercises given the Tories' present Commons majority. And if we recognise this, we are either forced to accept Tory edicts as a fait accompli or we must look to new more militant forms of extra-Parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the Government's right to rule.”

Peter Tatchell (1952) British gay rights activist

Article in London Labour Briefing, November 1981. When quoted in the House of Commons, Labour Party leader Michael Foot denounced him as the Labour candidate for Bermondsey. Source: Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey (Heretic Books, 1983) page 53.

J. Bradford DeLong photo

“The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.
My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Jeremy Corbyn photo
Immortal Technique photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“The net shifts from mass media to mess media.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Heath Ledger photo

“[The Joker is a] psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. … Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking about playing the Joker, in an interview conducted by Sarah Lyall, during filming of The Dark Knight, in London, as quoted in [Sarah Lyall, Movies: In Stetson or Wig, He's Hard to Pin Down, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.html, The New York Times, Movies, nytimes.com, Web, November 4, 2007, 2008-08-18]

Willy Brandt photo
Anthony Watts photo
Peter Sloterdijk photo
Benjamin Graham photo
Oliver Cowdery photo
Gregory Scott Paul photo

“[Deinonychus] is usually considered a small dinosaur. But the largest individual was an eleven-foot-long animal whose head approached half a yard long, and was of male-timber-wolf mass. If alive today it would be considered a big predator.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Gregory S. Paul (1988) Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, Simon and Schuster, p. 367
Predatory Dinosaurs of the World

Andrew Dickson White photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Lorin Morgan-Richards photo
Arshile Gorky photo
Hermann Rauschning photo
Willem de Sitter photo
Bell Hooks photo

“Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement-it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, "the problem that has no name," often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women-housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.'" That "more" she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife. She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. … Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc. When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, more than one third of all women were in the work force. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique.”

p. 1-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Jean Froissart photo

“This John Ball had the habit on Sundays after mass, when everyone was coming out of church, of going to the cloisters or the graveyard, assembling the people round him and preaching thus: "Good people, things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same."”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Cils Jehan Balle http://aballedemeufs.over-blog.com/ avoit eut d'usage que, les jours dou diemence après messe, quant toutes les gens issoient hors dou moustier, il s'en venoit en l'aitre et là praiechoit et faissoit le peuple assambler autour de li, et leur dissoit: "Bonnes gens, les coses ne poent bien aler en Engletière ne iront jusques à tant que li bien iront tout de commun et que il ne sera ne villains ne gentils homs, que nous ne soions tout ouni."
Book 2, p. 212.
Chroniques (1369–1400)

Ellsworth Kelly photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Alan Guth photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo
Mike Malloy photo
Ali Shariati photo
Richard Bertrand Spencer photo
Klaus Kinski photo
Peter Beckford photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo
Osama bin Laden photo
Georges Bernanos photo
Muammar Gaddafi photo

“The times of Arab nationalism and unity are gone forever. These ideas which mobilized the masses are only a worthless currency. Libya has had to put up with too much from the Arabs for whom it has poured forth both blood and money.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Remarks (2003), quoted in Nonproliferation Norms (2009) by Maria Rost Rublee, p. 161

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Hermann Weyl photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Edward Bernays photo
Trip Hawkins photo

“[The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.”

Trip Hawkins (1953) American businessman

Quoted in The Amazing PlayStation 2, Newsweek (via PR Newswire), 2006-02-26, 2007-01-21 http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-27-2000/0001150833&EDATE,

Gary Johnson photo
Rod Serling photo
Steve Sailer photo
Ashraf Pahlavi photo
Czeslaw Milosz photo
Patrick Kavanagh photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Phillip Guston photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Bernard Harcourt photo