Crowd

“ We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel—the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds. ”

“ One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd—thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. ”

“ I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as it seems to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our modern world, the silent master of what the crowds shall think. It has seemed to me that it is going to be a man of a marked type, and of a particular temperament, to whom we will have to look in our new and crowded world for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds. ”

“ How different from the crowd which one meets in the saloon of fashion, or at a political meeting, or at any other place, where men are accustomed to congregate! Here we are all jostled together, but gently, decorously. ”

“ Who are these, whom we can so easily distinguish from the crowd by their firmness of step and look of peace, walking softly where some spurt and some halt, holding, without rest or haste, the tenor of their way, as if they marched to music heard by their ears alone? ”

“ In similar vision the streets of those cities are always filled with this tumultuous and curious Crowd: restless, leaderless, astonished at itself and at the world, finding little intelligible either in the universe without or the universe within. Before which assembly in perpetual session there pass the phantom figures of those who appeal for its favour and its judgment: at first to a Crowd contemptuous, then to a Crowd acquiescent and astonished, ultimately to a Crowd applauding: themselves members of it, yet standing always separate and apart; because they alone are working towards an end. ”

“ A crowd which grew every second larger. A crowd which overflowed from the street itself, so that its tributaries streamed into the network of lanes and of alleys. An excited, a noisy, a shouting crowd. An angry crowd. ”

“ AFFIRMATION, REPETITION, CONTAGION When it is wanted to stir up a crowd for a short space of time, to induce it to commit an act of any nature—to pillage a palace, or to die in defence of a stronghold or a barricade, for instance—the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion, among which example is the most powerful in its effect. To attain this end, however, it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared by certain circumstances, and, above all, that he who wishes to work upon it should possess the quality to be studied farther on, to which I give the name of prestige. ”

“ The peculiarity of the crowd-mind is mainly in the readiness with which any communicable feeling is spread and augmented. Just as a heap of firebrands will blaze when one or two alone will chill and go out, so the units of a crowd “inflame each other by mutual sympathy and mutual consciousness of it.” ”

“ Imagine yourself in an extremely dense crowd, which swings you to and fro, and in and out, and every way but the right one; add to this the screams of women, the shouts of boys, the clanging of gongs, the firing of pistols, the ringing of bells, the bellowings of speaking-trumpets, the squeaking of penny dittos, the noise of a dozen bands, with three drums in each, all playing different tunes at the same time, the hallooing of showmen, and an occasional roar from the wild-beast shows; and you are in the very centre and heart of the fair. ”

“ The crowd is one liquid and living expanse capable of vibration. A mass is a sensitive-plant. Contact with the beautiful agitates ecstatically the surface of multitudes,—sure sign that the depth is sounded. ”

“ The Crowd is dumb, massive, and silent. There seems to be no one in the world to express it, to express its indomitable desire, its prayer, to lay at last its huge, terrible, beautiful will upon the earth. ”

“ You must accept facts, and these are facts. The world for the Crowd! The Crowd as Ruler! Even in your days that creed had been tried and condemned. To-day it has only one believer—a multiplex, silly one—the man in the Crowd. ”

“ The enterprise of touching the imagination of the crowd with goodness, which is being conducted every day on an enormous scale around us, has to be carried on, like all huge enterprises, by men who are in a large degree unconscious of it. ”

“ A crowd would at once lose its character of a crowd were it to credit its leaders with their services, whether of a party nature or rendered their country. The crowd that obeys a leader is under the influence of his prestige, and its submission is not dictated by any sentiment of interest or gratitude. ”

“ We wish to put ourselves on record, and to say that we do believe in human nature, and that we believe not only that the inspired employer is going to be evolved by the Crowd, but that the Crowd is going to recognize him and is going to take sides with him, and that the Crowd is going to justify him, make him succeed, is going to make his success its own success. In other words, we believe in heroes, crowds, and goodness; in men of heroic gifts—who are fit and meet to interpret the wills and desires of crowds—who are great men or Crowd-Men, crowds in spirit themselves. ”

“ Always in a crowd, and that crowd composed of all that was celebrated at the time, for wit, fashion, and beauty, by his own merit he was continually in advance, and, long before the age when other men enter the lists, he had already travelled far on the road to fame and fortune. ”

“ Not all crowd-movements, however, are local and temporary. There are passing moments of crowd-experience which are often too sweet to lose. The lapse into everyday realism is like "falling from grace." ”

“ Whether it was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them think, made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the individuality or invention in them, the personal self-control, the social responsibility in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. ”

“ A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose; a crowd on which a noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved ”

“ Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope. ”

“ A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth. ”

“ Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as." ”

“ The crowd in the streets is now wholly alive. Men dart hither and thither, as if possessed with a never-resting spirit. You speak to an acquaintance—a merchant, perhaps. He utters a few hurried words of greeting, while his eyes send keen glances on all sides of you; suddenly he catches sight of somebody in the crowd ”

“ Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization—having the extraordinary men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary ones—are equally impracticable. ”

“ If they do not move on, the crowd picks up the next hero at hand who is moving—and drops them.
One can watch in every civilized country to-day crowds picking up heroes, comparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones that wear the longest, and one by one taking the old ones down. ”

“ Among the crowd are those who have bartered, for ease, and wealth, and empty titles born of the king's breath—their ancient Udal rights, their Bonder privileges; others have sunk their proud hearts to bear the yoke of the stronger hand, yet gaze with yearning looks on the misty horizon that opens between the hills. ”

“ And after all what is really important to a nation is that the people in it—any chance crowd in a street in it should think. I confess I care very little one way or the other about the pennies being saved, or about the brewer's little touch of moral poetry, his idea that this particular crowd was solid Sunday-school from one end to the other, all through. ”

“ The crowd is kept in order by somebody here and there with a ribboned wand, for it is the most orderly and respectable crowd you ever saw. In fact, such a crowd would be an impossibility in England or any highly-civilized country. There are no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. ”

“ The crowd is always worth watching, but at that hour the crowd is at its best. The strain of the day is over and the weariness of night has not yet come. The crowd is fresh, vivacious, light-hearted. As I stood upon the steps, I saw young men and maidens keeping their trysts with each other ”

“ What a divine disorder! The peasants seem to have an instinctive sense for grouping. No matter how much the crowd moves or how many changes are evolved in it, it is always a beautiful whole, a fair scene, with balance of colour and form and sound. ”

“ A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought. ”

“ The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. ”

“ THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS. Strength of the imagination of crowds—Crowds think in images, and these images succeed each other without any connecting link—Crowds are especially impressed by the marvellous—Legends and the marvellous are the real pillars of civilisation—The popular imagination has always been the basis of the power of statesmen—The manner in which facts capable of striking the imagination of crowds present themselves for observation. ”

“ He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. ”

“ You want to go aside out of the crowd, where you can speak quietly. When you have knelt down, although it may have been in your own room alone, yet there is a crowd with you—a multitude of disturbing thoughts. To-day's work, and to-morrow's pleasure, the money to be paid, or the money that is owing to you, the cares of eating, and drinking, and clothing, the recollection of a trouble, real or fancied, the remembrance of some sharp word that made us smart and tingle, all these things make a crowd, and keep us back from Jesus. ”

“ or is it pink, to-day?' They pause and smile, not caring what they say, If only they may talk. The crowd flows past them like dividing waters. Dreaming they stand, dreaming they walk. ”

“ Everyone is forced to [8] speak as the crowd, think as the crowd, understand as the crowd. The tendency is to smother all that is unique, rare, delicate, secret. If you are to get anywhere in this progressive age you must be vulgar, you must add to your vulgarity unction. You must take sides upon dilemmas which are but half true, change the tempo of your music to ragtime, eat your spiritual food with a knife, drape yourself in the flag of the dominant party. In other words, you must be "one hundred per cent" crowd man. ”

“ In most cases the crowd naturally is under leaders, who, with an instinctive consciousness of the importance and strength of the crowd, seek to direct it much more through the power of suggestion than by sound conviction. ”

“ A people differs from a crowd also in that it is composed of a collection of groups, each having different interests and passions. In a crowd properly so-called—a popular assembly, for example—there are unities which may belong to very different social categories. ”

“ In the words of one writer, “The crowd not only needs to make adherents and thus maintain its existence and increase in volume and power; it needs no less to assimilate, to digest, the individuals which it swallows up.” ”

“ We have shown that crowds do not reason, that they accept or reject ideas as a whole, that they tolerate neither discussion nor contradiction, and that the suggestions brought to bear on them invade the entire field of their understanding and tend at once to transform themselves into acts. We have shown that crowds suitably influenced are ready to sacrifice themselves for the ideal with which they have been inspired. ”

“ The examples given of the mass or crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in a theatre fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. ”

“ As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd, and, though they should be distinguished men of learning, they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their speciality. ”