logo

Quotes About Masses

Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation.
~ Will Durant
Upon one great class of subjects, the largest and the most weighty of them all, where the leading and determining considerations that ought to lead to a conclusion are truth, justice, and humanity, there, gentlemen, all the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.
~ William Ewart Gladstone
We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again, -Caligula's Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet.-How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world...
~ William Gaddis
Heroin, declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. It's the opiate of the masses.
~ William Gibson
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written.
~ William L. Shirer
What the masses needed, he thought, were not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if successful, would attract adherents (were not most Germans drawn to the strong?) and give them a sense of power over the weak.
~ William L. Shirer
He came to three conclusions which explained to him the success of the Social Democrats: They knew how to create a mass movement, without which any political party was useless; they had learned the art of propaganda among the masses; and, finally, they knew the value of using what he calls "spiritual and physical terror.
~ William L. Shirer
Drexler's principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist.
~ William L. Shirer
It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly "socialists" and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it.
~ William L. Shirer
The depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war.
~ William L. Shirer
Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by
~ William L. Shirer
Democracy' was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower class, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many b those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified 'the democracy'.
~ China Mieville
La hambruna es el primer crimen de masas, y es muy difícil probarlo con certeza.
~ Christophe Bataille
People do not calculate. As masses, they cannot calculate. They feel only, and are therefore not led by interests nor state — or public Law, principles or deductions, but only by feeling. If you prefer the word, by instincts.
~ Hector Bolitho
But whether the amount of capital ever does limit the productiveness of industry, and thus fix a maximum which wages cannot exceed, it is evident that it is not from any scarcity of capital that the poverty of the masses in civilized countries proceeds. For not only do wages nowhere reach the limit fixed by the productiveness of industry, but wages are relatively the lowest where capital is most abundant.
~ Henry George
Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration which the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetuation of aristocracies. Where ten-penny Jack looks with contempt upon nine-penny Joe, the social injustice which makes the masses of the people hewers of wood and drawers of water for a privileged few, has the strongest bulwarks.
~ Henry George
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
~ Henry Louis Mencken
All the means of action - the shapeless masses - the materials - lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.
~ Leo Tolstoy
To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.
~ Leo Tolstoy
It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.
~ Leo Tolstoy
To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No
~ Leo Tolstoy
On what terms is the will of the masses transferred to a single person? On condition that he expresses the will of the whole people. In other words, power is power. Which is to say that power is a word with a meaning we cannot understand.
~ Leo Tolstoy
The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.
~ Leon Trotsky