Quotes About Herd

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.

Um ein tadelloses Mitglied einer Schafherde sein zu können, muß man vor allem ein Schaf sein.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism-how I hate them!

Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set?

We've got enough folks spouting those words around here. It's to the point now where even if I wanted to get married, I would resist just to keep from running with the herd.

But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn't reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most. The

Man is extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty. To deal with his discomfort, man tends to create a false sense of security by substituting certainty for uncertainty. It becomes the herd instinct.

the herd instinct and crowd behavior arise out of our desire to replace uncertainty with certainty

Sheep are in.

You know what 'congregate' means? It's from the Latin. 'Greg' means herd. 'Con' means with. We're with our herd.

It's lonely? Sure, it's lonely. That's what you asked for, didn't you? After all, if you hadn't been too superior for the gang, you wouldn't be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd.

The rush of a herd of bellowing yaks at a wild gallop, waving their huge tails, is a grand sight.

The Americans did not withdraw from the battlefield in a manner recommended by military manuals. Rather they left in a crowd with no regiment retaining its integrity as a unit. Gates made no attempt to discipline or reorganize this herd, choosing rather to outdistance it astride a fast horse.

So they herd sheep with wolves in Buck these days

It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of the steers.

elephant's trumpeting

Bring up the great bull-buffaloes, the blue-skinned herd-bulls with the angry eyes. Drive them to and fro as I order.

stared at the herd, and they stared back. One of them stood in profile to the house, half a ton of horse. The scars scrawled across his side looked like they might be a decade old, not a few hours, but for all that, they were quite distinct, in silver relief against his fine white hair. Hacked there in the horse's flesh were the words FUCK YOU. They whinnied together, the pack of them. It sounded like laughter.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Man is a gregarious creature, we are told, a social being. Does that mean he is also a herd animal?...Are men no better than sheep or cattle, that they must live always in view of one another in order to feel a sense of safety? I can't believe it!

And the unclean spirits went out, and entered the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea… and were choked in the sea.

Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons.

Most people instinctively follow a dominant trend in an organization or community, without critical evaluation of its merits. The herd instinct is strong.

History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.