Browsing Topic Best Herds Quotes

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.

Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.

Conflict follows wrongdoing as surely as flies follow the herd.

Repeal all laws which assume that mankind is a herd of cattle

Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.

Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes- and most fools do- but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.

Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd’s Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship…something else.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

Christians call it faith … I call it the herd.

The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

Lions, wolves, and vultures don’t live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbor, and yet we herd together.

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

But courage in fighting is by no means the only form, nor perhaps even the most important. There is courage in facing poverty, courage in facing derision, courage in facing the hostility of one’s own herd. In these, the bravest soldiers are often lamentably deficient. And above all there is the courage to think calmly and rationally in the face of danger, and to control the impulse of panic fear or panic rage.

But the average person doesnt have that much imagination. They just want to be entertained. They want to have the tableau presented for them. They dont want to participate beyond a certain point. They want the safety of the herd, to be catered to, sit back and enjoy.

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

But see, the shepherds shun the noonday heat,The lowing herds to murmuring brooks retreat,To closer shades the panting flocks remove;Ye gods! And is there no relief for love?

Most people don’t really want to think independently or make decisions; they’re herd animals with herd instincts to keep to the middle of the group where it’s safest, don’t stand out too much, don’t move too far away from convention, etc. They want to be led and dictated to. But they’re stubborn, mulish animals and they like to think they’re independent and free.

Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

I don’t want to follow the herd.

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

The eyes of the social herd, who always observe little things, and generally form from them their opinions of great affairs.

We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call ‘I’ is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd.

One is born into a herd of buffaloes and must be glad if one is not trampled under foot before one’s time.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you’ll be the richest.