Quotes About Masses

The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.

The art of leadership is a serious matter. One must not lag behind a movement, because to do so is to become isolated from the masses. But one must not rush ahead, for to rush ahead is to lose contact with the masses. He who wished to lead a movement must conduct a fight on two fronts--against those who lag behind and those who rush ahead.

Though He did what he could to help the multitudes, He had to devote Himself primarily to a few men, rather than the masses, so that the masses could at last be saved. This was the genius of his strategy.

One whose troops repeatedly congregate in small groups here and there, whispering together, has lost the masses. One who frequently grants rewards is in deep distress. One who frequently imposes punishments is in great difficulty. One who is at first excessively brutal and then fears the masses is the pinnacle of stupidity.

His master’s pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master’s house out than the master himself would. But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses—the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

I think I hear the voice of an environmentalist. Why stop with Alaska, however. Why don't we depopulate Montana, Idaho, Washington, Colorado the California and turn them back into pristine land masses as well. You can't have enough pristine land masses - that's my view.

Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.

Crackers, toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called DUMPLINGS! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name.

I took a sheet of paper, divided it into debt and credit columns on the arguments for and against God and immortality. On Christmas Eve I wrote 'bankrupt' at the foot. And it was on Christmas morning 1895, after I had celebrated three Masses, while the bells of the parish church were ringing out the Christmas message of peace, that, with great pain, I found myself far out from the familiar land--homeless, aimlessly drifting. But the bells were right after all; from that hour on I have been wholly free from the nightmare of doubt that had lain on me for ten years.

As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction.

The direction and rhythm of human progress do not depend on the masses, even when they add up to hundreds of millions; they depend on superior minorities.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Unfortunately, religion often works to shrink and tame the very wild and mysterious forces that first drew our wonder. In the process of making the inexplicable safe for the masses, the possibilities for real illusion-piercing insight becomes reduced. One might say that they are only available to those who dare to ride the breaking crest of direct life-altering experience.

The indigenous peoples of the great tourist spots seem to lose their souls. All cultural, religious, and political efforts and ideals are crippled since the culture is engaged only in luring ever more tourists. It is not the contact with an essentially foreign population that corrupts the inhabitants of the great foreign resorts. It is the contact with great masses of people who are seeking fir the moment only well-being and not salvation that weakens and devalues the indigenous population.

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.

Unless you are addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing positive direction, they'll never support you. The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

Times are completely different now. If you're a brand new artist with a record you want to release to the masses, I would suggest you try and get it hot yourself first. This way you can create your own demand so you'll end up having the option of demanding what you want if you do decide to sign with a label. If you don't and you still get on hot on your own, you then have the ability to reap all of your profits.

It must be assumed and established as a principle, that the right of private property must be regarded as sacred. Wherefore, the law ought to favor this right and, so far as it can, see that the largest possible number among the masses of the population prefer to own property.... But if the productive activity of the multitude can be stimulated by the hope of acquiring some property... , it will gradually come to pass that, with the difference between extreme wealth and extreme penury removed, one class will become the neighbor to the other.

True democracy or the swaraj of the masses can never come through untruthful and violent means.

Inflation makes the wealthiest people richer and the masses poorer.

Deep patriots don't just sing the song, 'America the Beautiful' and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty -- from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don't just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded -- 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'

And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did.

We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are agreed that there is no part of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that, as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact.

Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

The Arabs could have peace tomorrow if sufficient numbers of Palestinians were not content to be used as cannon fodder in fruitless assaults on Israel, even as the surrounding Arab powers distract the Arab masses with the red herring of Israel while retarding their countries with their repression and corruption.

This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

True education is limited to those people who would die without knowing, whereas the masses in the institutions are merely going through the motions, for education is a way of living.

The same arguments which go to show that knowledge is power, that the condition of a people is improved in proportion as the masses are educated, have their application with equal weight to the deaf.

The pop world is popular, and it's about what the people want and connecting to the masses, whereas opera, although it was once popular - and I still believe it can be - it has become very elitist and intellectual, but that certainly doesn't sell tickets. It's a struggle, but I've always embraced struggle and thrived off of it, so it's the way my life needs to go.

An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.

Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.

The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists.

There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

The literature is like that - they [unions] are constantly talking about the masses, the danger they pose, and how to control them. They understand what they're doing, and they're very class conscious. They press policies which work for their interests.

I love to deliver orgasms to the masses!

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.

When anarchists are having a debate, they're having a debate about tactics, 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?' The question isn't 'Should you do this?', 'Should you do that?', the primary question is how do you build confidence among the masses of people who experience hierarchies, who experience exploitation, who experience oppression.

When the masses begin to vibrate with an energy of love, the world will no longer be a container for war, violence, and lies.