quotations about mobs
Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
interview, ReasonOnline, August 2004
I hate all mobs and tumultuary assemblies one one side or the other; they are the senseless instruments of party, the clumsy machinery by which imperfect government is carried on or opposed by imperfect politicians; they are in their very nature unlawful and unconstitutional, directly at variance with our free institutions, which are as much opposed to anarchy as to despotism; they are alternately encouraged from interest, or tolerated from fear.
D. M. MOIR
attributed, Day's Collacon
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labor in your fields and serve in your houses -- that man your navy, and recruit your army -- that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob; but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.
LORD BYRON
debate on the Frame-Work Bill in the House of Lords, February 27, 1812
A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing its work.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"
The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you.
JANE PORTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
The crowd has a way of being right.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Rector of Justin
When men take it in their heads to-day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838
The mob have neither judgment nor principle, ready to brawl at night for the reverse of what they desired in the morning.
TACITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
You have no security, no arm of defence, so long as there are among you the materials out of which mobs are made, or tools for the lawless or the ill-disposed to use. Your only safety is in education, in an education which trains up the whole people to love law and order, which trains them up to love virtue and freedom, and which fits them to maintain freedom in the state, by first maintaining it in themselves.
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
An Address on Intemperance delivered in Walpole, New Hampshire, February 26, 1833