Mass Quotes - Page 30

• Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

  Lord Acton

  Politics, Politician, Crime

  John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom (and other Essays)”, p.61, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.

  Friedrich Engels

  Mean, Organization, Paris

  Letter to Philipp Van Patten, www.marxists.org. April 18, 1883.

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• All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

  Stefan Zweig

  Horse, Eye, Epidemics

  "The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European". Book by Stefan Zweig, transl. by Marion Sonnenfeld, p. 10, 1942.

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• To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but mean-time the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-a-vis the masses.

  Oswald Spengler

  School, Mean, Leader

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• I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand. I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!

  Hermann Goring

  Goering, Action, Murder

  Closing statement to the Nuremberg tribunal on August 31, 1946. "Witness to Nuremberg" by Richard Sonnenfeldt, p. 70, 2006.

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• Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.

  Jaron Lanier

  Acceptance, People, Volunteer

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• We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Believe, Compassion, Punishment

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• The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Confused, Taken, Law

  Peter Kropotkin (1927). “Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings”, p.198, Courier Corporation

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• Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

  Aldous Huxley

  Taste, Facts, Interest

  Aldous Huxley (2008). “Brave New World Revisited”, p.57, Random House

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• Money in the hands of one or two men is like a dungheap in a barnyard. So long as it lies in a mass, it does no good; but, if it is only spread out evenly on the land, everything will grow.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Money, Lying, Men

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• Popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine man.

  John Dewey

  Men, Medicine, Psychology

  The Public and Its Problems Ch. 5

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• Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Speed, Electric

  "Access", Issues 165-176, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, (p. xxiii), 1984.

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• With the coming of radio as a mass medium, suddenly the world changed. It became about, 'Can this leader project emotional connection through the way he speaks on the radio?' And the anxiety about whether he could do that, we've inherited.

  Tom Hooper

  Emotional, Leader, Anxiety

  "Filmmaker Tom Hooper". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. January 28, 2011.

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• Strength without agility is a mere mass.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Agility, Mere

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, 1982.

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• Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

  Mao Zedong

  Party, Organization, Discipline

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.126, Lulu.com

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• We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, an obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

  John F. Kerry

  Mass Destruction, Guarantees That, Hussein

  John F. Kerry's Speech to the floor of the Senate, Congressional Record, November 9, 1997.

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• To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.

  Georges Bernanos

  Girl, Silly, People

  "Joy". Book by Georges Bernanos, 1929.

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• The elimination of individual capitalists and the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism in Russia has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Character, Russia, People

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich, (Preface to the Third Edition), August 1942.

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• It is obvious that the fascist mass pestilence, with its background of thousands of years, cannot be mastered with social measures corresponding to the past three hundred years. The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Sex, Past, Discovery

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich, (Preface to the Third Edition), August 1942.

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• Politics is a subordinate matter; its form of appearance constantly changes depending on the needs of the masses, the same way cocottes adjust to the needs of men by transforming and masking themselves. Because of that it is not fundamental. That is about what endures, what is unique, what is in the stream of illusions - what is eliminated from the workings of the shadows.

  Max Beckmann

  Men, Unique, Shadow

  Max Beckmann (2013). “On My Painting - Max Beckmann”, p.4, Tate Enterprises Ltd

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• Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Light, People

  Herbert Marshall Mcluhan (2010). “Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews”, p.268, McClelland & Stewart

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• If humans did not manufacture some of their own to appear like better people, people would not aspire to be someone else. They would stop dreaming. And if people didn't dream, they would be awake to discover the wonderful misery of being. There are no singular great people. There is only a small percentage of people manufactured to look significant, for the purpose of creating the feeling of mass insignificance.

  Craig Stone

  Dream, Creating, People

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• The Mass is the greatest blasphemy of God, and the highest idolatry upon earth, an abomination the like of which has never been in Christendom since the time of the Apostles.

  Martin Luther

  Earth, Abomination, Blasphemy

  Martin Luther, Alexander Chalmers (1857). “The Table Talk of Martin Luther”, p.69

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• All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.

  Ernst Mach

  Essence, Students, Consideration

  Ernst Mach (2013). “The Science of Mechanics”, p.7, Cambridge University Press

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• Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.

  Albert J. Nock

  Political, Mind, Suffrage

  "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" by Albert J. Nock, (p. 88), 1943.

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