Quotes About Masses

Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect.

The popular masses are like water, and the army is like a fish. How then can it be said that when there is water, a fish will have difficulty in preserving its existence? An army which fails to maintain good discipline gets into opposition with the popular masses, and thus by its own action dries up the water.

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.

I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.

Character alone will have real effect on the masses.

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

To be proactive is to educate yourself and get the word out via social media, or through one of the many animal-welfare organizations around the world, and by signing petitions, starting your own campaigns, rescuing and fostering animals, organizing cleanups, recycling, volunteering at your local animal shelter, going to eco-tourist destinations or photo safaris. This will help get the word out to the masses, and hopefully, this will bring more awareness and more compassion to animal welfare.

Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.

I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses.

To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.

Photography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.

The masses will not vote for their own upliftment in a higher order of society. This has to be accomplished without their support and request, despite them and indeed against them. It is absurd to pivot your whole project, as does a conventional party, on the submission of change to the decision of those who so need to be changed. You might as well make the case for law and order conditional on the approval of the criminals.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

The big honour of the big revolutions belongs to the high intelligence who design the revolution, not to the masses who support and participate the revolution!

It is people who are important, not the masses.

Until today the rights of people have always been put forward by a few individuals acting in the name of the masses. Today instead of people no longer want to be represented; each wants to speak for himself and participate directly - it's the same for the Negroes, for the Jews, for women.

A successful bloody revolution can only mean further misery for the masses.

Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

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.

Many people feel that mass acceptance and smooth socialization are desirable life paths for a young adult… Many people are often wrong… Don’t bother being nice. Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest. Let me be more clear; if you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

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.

If girls were going after me, I would not only admit it, but I would probably exaggerate about the swarming masses. I can flirt and have fun, but at the end of the day, I'm not Tom Cruise. Girls are not falling all over me.

The language of religion holds the most currency for the masses.

Let us remember that we are all Indians eating Indian grain and salt, and living on the dumb Indian masses.

The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

I don't feel that there is anything deep in the political culture that prevents "educating the masses." I'm old enough to recall vividly the high level of culture, general and political, among first-generation working people during the Great Depression. Workers' education was lively and effective, union-based - mostly the vigorous rising labor movement, reviving from the ashes of the 1920s. I've often seen independent and impressive initiatives in working-class and poor and deprived communities today.

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

The basic function of the government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and it's principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler - to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest of schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

Today Satan rules the world. The masses no longer believe in God. And, yes, Satan is in the Vatican.

If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.

Development has to result in jobs. What we need is not just more production, but mass production and production by masses.

If the masses started to accept UFOs, it would profoundly affect their attitude towards life, politics, everything. It would threaten the status quo. Whenever people come to realize that there are larger considerations than their own petty lives, they are ripe to make radical changes on a personal level, which would eventually lead to a political revolution in society as a whole

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.

You can be a model to the masses, but to go to the higher levels of influence, you have to work with individuals.

Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.

One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.

If every man and woman were to take the meaning of their life and pursue it passionately, they would alter the social landscape overnight. In fact, that's how lasting revolutions are made- not by the raised arm of the masses, not by the military seizure of power, not by the political coup d'etat, but by individuals asserting who they are one at a time.

Socialists do not merely want a welfare state, they absolutely must have one. They must have a grovelling dependent class from which to obtain their daily opiate: an hallucinogenic euphoria which comes from the delusion of being superior to and more altruistic than all others. They must have 'the poor, huddled masses' in much the same manner as vampires must have the blood of their victims.

I never look at the masses as my responsibility. I look at the individual. I can love only one person at a time. I can feed only one person at a time. Just one, one, one.

Witch' is just a religion, okay? No baby-sacrificing, no Black Masses, no sending imps out to scare the dog-snot out of kids, trying to make them think they're crazy. We don't do things like that. Our number-one law is 'Have fun in this lifetime, but don't hurt anybody.' Nice little paraphrase of "An it harm none, do as ye will" if I do say so myself.

Machines are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the Garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve.

Republics, one after another . . . have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. . . .

With what moral authority can they speak of human rights - the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this - the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings.