Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question.

The role of the scholar is to destroy chimeras, that of the statesman is to make use of them.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.