Quotes About Influence

A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.

If you couldn't kill your adversaries, or keep them imprisoned for ever, there was surely only one option left in the Colonel Alexander canon: you change their minds.

Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

His second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. Le Bon listed the tricks: 'A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.

The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying.

All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: "I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don't know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer." And Goebbels: "Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

Glenn Beck did not fall into line. He told his listeners that Trump was a "dictator in the making.

Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he," wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

what we believe is constantly reinforced by people who believe the same thing.

His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd.

On Twitter we make our own decisions about who deserves obliteration. We form our own consensus, and we aren't being influenced by the criminal justice system or by the media. This makes us formidable.

Alex is basically the most irresponsible man I have ever met. He uses his powers to inflame paranoia. He boldly makes stuff up to suit his weird agenda. Alex eschews facts and reason and he definitely should not have political sway. The

But amongst a group who hadn't read it an opinion was beginning to form

the Bush family's proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What

Trump might have appointed a less-eerie chief to replace Manafort. But instead he doubled-down, choosing the even eerier Stephen Bannon. Bannon

The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us — that is terrifying. THE END

psychopaths made the world go around.

It turns out that the concept of group madness was the creation of a nineteenth-century French doctor called Gustave Le Bon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behaviour in a crowd. Our free will evaporates. A contagious madness takes over, a complete lack of restraint. We can't stop ourselves.

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

a preponderance of psychopaths at the top, in the corporate and political worlds – a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.

It is a frightening and huge thought," I said, "that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there." "It

Parenthood is an amazing opportunity to be able to ruin someone from scratch.

In whose delusional mind is democracy made better by letting wealthier people control more of it?

If I was to really get at the burr in my saddle, it's not politics — and this is, I think, probably a horrible analogy — but I look at politicians as, they are doing what inherently they need to do to retain power. Their job is to consolidate power. When you go to the zoo and you see a monkey throwing poop, you go, 'That's what monkeys do, what are you gonna do?' But what I wish the media would do more frequently is say, 'Bad monkey.