The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Interpretation
The collective imagination of a crowd can be easily influenced.
Edgar Allan Poe suggests that a mob's opinions and feelings are driven by their imagination, rather than rational thought. This idea implies that if a leader can tap into the collective imagination of a crowd, they can guide or manipulate the crowd's behavior with relative ease.
In practice
During a political rally, one might cite this quote to illustrate how leaders can sway public opinion.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
If your religion doesn't teach you the difference between good and evil, your religion is worse than useless.
Do we believe housing is a right and that affordable housing is part of what it should mean to be an American? I say yes.
My job is not to save 'The Wheel of Time', to fix 'The Wheel of Time', or anything like that. My job is not to screw it up.
You can only explain America's gun violence problem through guns, because mental illness doesn't automatically lead to violence, and it doesn't lead to violence anywhere else but America.
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