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.
We Protestants automatically assume that the Pharisees are the Catholics. They are the self-righteous people who have made Christianity a form of legalistic religion, thereby destroying the free grace of the Gospel. We Protestants are the tax collectors, knowing that we are sinners and that our lives depend upon God's free grace.
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Alas, how quickly the gratitude owed to the dead flows off, how quick to be proved a deceiver.
Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.
Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.
Oh, I'd love to wear a rainbow everyday, _x000D_ And tell the world that everything's okay, _x000D_ But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back, _x000D_ Till things are brighter, I'm the Man in Black.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.