Quotes on Crowds

Like a fiend in a cloud,_x000D_ With howling woe,_x000D_ After night I do crowd,_x000D_ And with night will go;_x000D_ I turn my back to the east,_x000D_ From whence comforts have increased;_x000D_ For light doth seize my brain_x000D_ With frantic pain.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.

I know I'm no glamour girl, and it's not easy for me to get up in front of a crowd of people. It used to bother me a lot, but now I've got it figured out that God gave me this talent to use, so I just stand there and sing.

Most restaurants fail. The sad ones are stillborn. The mad ones flourish within the bustle and excitement of fame, notoriety, the thrill of the new. But they rarely sustain the glow. They are balloons kept aloft by a restless crowd. Only the strange, the freaks of restaurant perfection, can sustain life beyond a few years.

I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.

Every one in a crowd has the power to throw dirt; none out of ten have the inclination.

...of two simple men I saw today on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends, the one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kissed him. While the one to depart tightly pressed the one to remain in his arms.

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you.

Where'er you walk cool gales shall fan the glade, Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade. Where'er you tread the blushing flowers shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.

You're in the midst of a war: a battle between the limits of a crowd seeking the surrender of your dreams, and the power of your true vision to create and contribute. It is a fight between those who will tell you what you cannot do, and that part of you that knows...and has always known...that we are more than our environment; and that a dream, backed by an unrelenting will to attain it, is truly a reality with an imminent arrival.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion's roar.

To me spirituality needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.

This, books can do-nor this alone; they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise; Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise. Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone; Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings.

There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion