Quotes About Masses

Jeffersonian Democracy simply meant the possession of the federal government by the agrarian masses led by an aristocracy of slave-owning masses.

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.

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.

The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.

You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well I took masses of opiates religiously.

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principle motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

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.

The Germans tend to like to blame the Nazi experience on one man who can be scapegoated. If you pile all the blame onto him, you exonerate the German masses from any responsibility.

Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?

If you're doing a big spectacle film, you've got to be mindful of large masses. Even then, you've got to be responsible only to your storytelling.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.

the masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things.

Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is notas efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

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.

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

The TV set, or Satanic family altar, has grown more elaborate since the early 50s, from the tiny, fuzzy screen to huge ‘entertainment centers’ covering entire walls with several TV monitors. What started as an innocent respite from everyday life has become in itself a replacement for real life for millions, a major religion of the masses.

Inflation makes the wealthiest people richer and the masses poorer.

I set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

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.

It's always difficult when you want to do something really new, and you also want it to reach the masses, because the majority of people want to see what they've already seen before, or that they're already familiar with. To open the majority of peoples' minds to something new is difficult.

The Republican Party can lead any person to believe that their promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line – no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.

Time and progress are synonymous terms--nothing can stop either. Truth will prevail and that is why I know that my teachings will reach the masses and finally be adopted as universal.

My main concern is that there is a balance in the system and that some art-based hip-hop can get out to the masses, 'cause right now people are not responding to what they don't know. Most people are just afraid to think on their own.

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

Liberty in the United States will never be reestablished so long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural feats and therefore tolerate a virtually unlimited exercise of presidential power. Until we can restore limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us from great presidents.

It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.

They maintain that only a dictatorship - their dictatorship, of course - can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.

All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

Type production has gone mad, with its senseless outpouring of new types... only in degenerate times can personality (opposed to the nameless masses) become the aim of human development.

Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the 'working masses'.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Social democracy.. is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh.

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots - the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?

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.

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

You need to find a way to propel this creativity to the masses. People get brainwashed and they start to forget what's good.

The people are drugged with religion; and that's why the elites - who understand that it is just a ritual, and understand the truth of it but won't teach the truth of it to awaken the masses of the people: so, the leaders live in luxury at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor.

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

I was raised Catholic,I took from that was a sense of theater and drama, and also the idea that there were truths that couldn't actually be uttered directly but really had to be reached through ritual. You come out of those Masses so moved, and you're like, "Why did that happen?" And the truth of it is that it happened through an hour of highly enacted ritual.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.