Quotes about mob (236 quotes, page 3) | Quotes of famous people

“The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Protestant Mystics", p. 72
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Context: The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob. A woman might spend twenty years nursing lepers without having any notice taken of her, but let her once exhibit the stigmata or live for long periods on nothing but the Host and water, and in no time the crowd will be clamoring for her beatification.

Suffering

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 2 The Totalitarian Movement, page 80 https://books.google.de/books?id=I0pVKCVM4TQC&pg=PT104&dq=A+mixture+of+gullibility+and+cynicism+had+been+an+outstanding+characteristic+of+mob+mentality+before+it+became+an+everyday+phenomenon+of+masses.&hl=de&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=A%20mixture%20of%20gullibility%20and%20cynicism%20had%20been%20an%20outstanding%20characteristic%20of%20mob%20mentality%20before%20it%20became%20an%20everyday%20phenomenon%20of%20masses.&f=false
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Context: A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

World , Thinking , Change , Time

“It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Passive Resistance
Context: When a physician sees that his patient's strength is being exhausted so rapidly by the intensity of his agony that he will die of exhaustion before the medical processes inaugurated have a chance to do their curative work, he administers an opiate. But a good physician is always loath to do so, knowing that one of the influences of the opiate is to interfere with and defeat the medical processes themselves. He never does it except as a choice of evils. It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.

Disease

“Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.”

Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist

Source: Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974), p. 121
Context: When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. (Not that the group is always on the right side of the issue. Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.)

“I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

"I Am the People, the Mob" (1916)

People

“The more modern war becomes, the more essential appear the basic qualities that from the beginning of history have distinguished armies from the mobs. The first of these is discipline.”

William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim (1891–1970) former Governor-General of Australia

Source: Defeat Into Victory (1961), p. 451

War , Appearance , History

“Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties.”

Michael Burleigh (1955) American historian and writer

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. xii

Loyalty

“The mob currently in power are determined to crash us out of the EU on October 31 and will sacrifice everything at the altar of new trade deals. Food safety standards, consumer protections, animal welfare standards will all be ditched if it means securing a trade deal with the US. This will leave our farmers concerned not so much with tackling our climate emergency but with survival against an onslaught from cheap imports.”

Molly Scott Cato (1963) British economist and Member of the European Parliament

Said in an article for the Stroud News and Journal. OPINION: Stop Brexit to save farmers and the planet says Molly Scott Cato https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/17858980.opinion-stop-brexit-save-farmers-planet-says-molly-scott-cato/ (24 August 2019)
2019

Animals , Food

“Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such brutality as has been ever since the war and as is now being perpetrated upon the Negro in the South. How easy for us to go to Russia and drop a tear of sympathy over the persecuted Jew. But a step across Mason’s and Dixon’s line will bring us upon a scene of horrors before which those of Russia, bad as they are, pale into insignificance! No irresponsible, blood-thirsty mobs prowl over Russian territory, lashing and lynching its citizens.”

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) American communist anarchist labor organizer

"Southern Lynching" (April 1892)

War , Bad luck , Tear , History

“The people will rise, and at last royalty will have arrayed against it philosophy, which is intelligence, Parliament, which is the middle class, and the mob, which is the people; in other words, the lever with which Archimedes can raise the world.”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Balsamo the Magician (or The Memoirs of a Physician) by Alex. Dumas (1891)

World , Intelligence , People

“The pogroms in Pakistan and Bangladesh after the demolition of the Babri Masjid left 50,000 Hindus homeless in Bangladesh and triggered another wave of refugees from both countries towards India. In Pakistan, 245 Hindu temples were demolished, in Bangladesh a similar number was attacked, and even in England some temples were set on fire by Muslim mobs.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Country

“We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1770s, Boston Massacre trial (1770)

People , Boy

“Ideal cooperation is rational and intentional rather than accidental. The clumsy, unsystematic production of existing societies is replaced by perfectly symmetrical and unified procedures. The whole of society constitutes one mighty organism carrying on the functions necessary to its maintenance and welfare in the most intelligent and magnanimous manner. The social ideal is an organized fraternity of perfectly articulating supplements, assaulting the inanimate as an individual personality, not as a mob of incompatible ruffians.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, p. 155

Personality , Intelligence

“Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all on me. And it seemed that each year the news got worse. The first of the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama. That was when i first heard of Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman. The Black people boycotted the buses. It was a nasty struggle. Black people were harassed and attacked and, if i remember correctly, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly, terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age. When the news about Little Rock came on, you could hear a pin drop at my house. We would all sit there horrified. Sometimes, afterward, somebody would say something, but usually we would just sit there lost in our own thoughts. I guess there was nothing to say. And each year i would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered. Then the news seemed too real.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: In Her Own Words, p. 73

Housing , Bad luck , Dogs , Children

“The mob has always behaved in this way—eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Way

“The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint like man exalted into a divine personage and worshiped for a god. Though perhaps misunderstood, reviled and even persecuted while living, the apotheosis is almost sure to come after death: and the victim of yesterday’s mob, raised to the stage of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely spiritualized their natures, so that it may be supposed that they were heavenly incarnations and not mortal like other men.”

Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) Union United States Army officer

Life of Buddha and Its Lessons https://cdn.website-editor.net/e4d6563c50794969b714ab70457d9761/files/uploaded/AdyarPamphlet_No15.pdfThe (May 1912)

Selfishness , God , History , Making love

“This situation has gotten to the point where it appears that the leadership of the Democratic Party is rushing headfirst towards historical fascism, embracing not only socialist interventionist ideology and collectivistic metaphysics, but encouraging uncivility that has incited mob-like violence that harkens back to Nazi street firebrands.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 116

Appearance

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, the less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.
Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Hate , Understanding , People , Spring

“Everything about this border wall situation — Trump’s extralegal tantrum, the craven capitulation of McConnell and the Republicans, the shameless lies, the howling mobs, all of it — is a disgrace… Most disgraceful of all is the idea of the wall itself: a monument to vicious nativism, white nationalism, toxic masculinity and perfect cowardice.”

William Rivers Pitt (1971) writer

"Can Trump’s Wall Survive His Fake Emergency?" Truthout (16 February 2019)

Perfection , Idea

“His book has the force of a mob-protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. The wheel turns and turns and it does not matter, one hardly notices that the captain of the company, killed on page 159, is alive again a hundred pages later. It does not matter that every stock situation of the war, suicide, the murder of an officer, the slaughter of prisoners, a vision of Christ, is apportioned to Company K, because the book is not written in any realistic convention. It is the only War-book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes, not an imitation but a development of eighteenth-century prose.”

William March (1893–1954) United States Marine, novelist, short story writer

In a Graham Greene review of the novel Company K for the newspaper The Spectator.

Reading , War , Books , Christ

“America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.
Letter to William D. Ticknor (9 January 1855)

Chance , Books , Women , Success

“The whole nation has come a long, long way in extending the frontiers of civil rights. If we are true to the facts, we must admit this. Twenty-five years ago, a year hardly passed when numerous Negroes were not brutally lynched by some vicious mob in the South. Today lynchings have about ceased. Twenty-five years ago, most of the states in the South had what was known as a poll-tax. The poll-tax system was cleverly contrived to keep many, many Negroes from becoming registered voters. Today the poll-tax has been eliminated in all but four states. And just a few weeks ago, Congress unanimously passed a bill amending the Constitution calling for an end to the poll-tax in all federal elections.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

Way

“There is also need for leadership and concern on the part of white people of good will in the North, if this problem is to be solved. Genuine liberalism on the question of race. And what we too often find in the North is a sort of quasi-liberalism based on the principle of looking objectively at all sides, and it is a liberalism that gets so involved in looking at all sides, that it doesn’t get committed to either side. It is a liberalism that is so objectively analytical that it fails to get subjectively committed. It is a liberalism that is neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. And we must come to see that his problem in the United States is not a sectional problem, but a national problem. No section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. It is one thing for a white person of good will in the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burned in Anniston, Alabama, with freedom riders, or when a nasty mob assembles around a University of Mississippi, and even goes to the point of killing and injuring people to keep one Negro out of the university, or when a Negro is lynched or churches burned in the South; but that same person of good will must rise up with the same righteous indignation when a Negro in his state or in his city cannot live in a particular neighborhood because of the color of his skin, or cannot join a particular academic society or fraternal order or sorority because of the color of his or her skin, or cannot get a particular job in a particular firm because her happens to be a Negro. In other words, a genuine liberalism will see that the problem can exist even in one’s front and back yard, and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

Justice , Freedom , Question , Country

“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Oddest Prophet – Søren Kierkegaard by Malcolm Muggeridge

Democracy , Soul , God , Fate

“Nothing beautiful survives the mob.”

Pierce Brown book Dark Age

Source: Dark Age (2019), Ch. 16: Rider of the Storm; Rhone

Beauty

“I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”

Henry James book The Awkward Age

Said by Vanderbank in Book I, ch. II.
The Awkward Age (1899)

Time , Friendship

“The really remarkable fact which is to be inferred from the conduct of the Southern States is, the genuine alarm with which they regarded the workings of Democracy. ... They had acted in partnership with one for seventy years. They had watched it ripening year by year to the full development of mob supremacy. ... They deliberately decided that civil war, with all its horrors, and with all its peculiar risks to themselves as slaveowners, was a lighter evil than to be surrendered to the justice or the clemency of a victorious Democracy. It is not for Europe to dispute the accuracy of their judgment.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: 'Democracy on its Trial', Quarterly Review, 110, 1861, p. 274

Democracy , Partnership , Justice , War

“Our laws are being disregarded right and left. The mobs are out. The police are being subjected to violence. Intimidation and violence are contrary to the law of the land. It should be condemned by every responsible citizen. We have the finest police force in the world. It is under the Queen that they defend our laws, and it is under the Queen that we should support them.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

Speech to Justice, London (28 June 1977), quoted in The Times (29 June 1977), p. 4

World , Support , Law

“we sans love equals mob”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

31
73 poems (1963)

Love , Making love

“A threat to free speech. It was marvelous how they accepted the principles of democracy and rejected them at the same time by talk of mob action!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Winds of Limbo aka The Fireclown (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 151)

Democracy , Time

“Revenge is the philosophy of dictators and mob bosses... used to keep others in line with threats of economic ruin, violence, or worse.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

It's Even Worse Than You Think (2018)

Revenge

“You should not allow yourself to be compared to the mob, or the people who are ready to rebel against a regime which they believe does not serve their interests any longer. Great ideas come only when we are deeply thinking alone and thus, making it much easier to put these thoughts into action.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

People , Idea , Thinking

“Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address to the American People on the Situation in Little Rock (1957)

Decision

“The worst criminals were not the men who did the deed. The crime of mobs and courtiers, infuriated by the lust of vengeance and of power, is not so strange a portent as the exultation of peaceful men, influenced by no present injury or momentary rage, but by the permanent and incurable perversion of moral sense wrought by a distorted piety.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Source: 1860s, The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew (1869)

Sense , Rage , Peace , Men

“A just man stand's on the side of the right with such conviction, thát neither the passion of a mob, nor the violence of a despot can make him overstep the bounds of reason.”

Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658) Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose writer and philosopher

Passion

“I heard that you don't do favors for the mob but do you treat the devil the same?”

Sophia Bartolai (2001)

Comedic response to CW network questioning about Italian heritage at festival booth.
Source: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9556267/bio?item=nq0320448#quotes

Quotes about mob page 3

Quotes about mob
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