Quotessence
Home / Authors / Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon Quotes

Social Psychologist

Filter quotes by topic

AllCrowdsAtheismCrowdPeoplePositive AtheismMindPoliticsTruthBehaviorBeliefCivilizationGovernanceHuman NatureMassMassesPsychologyAcceptingActionAncientCapable

Famous Gustave Le Bon Quotes

“A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.”

CivilizationCrowdsIndifferenceDeclineThe Masses
Book:The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Create image

“To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing attributes peculiar to the gods of never having to answer for their actions and never making a mistake. Their wishes must be humbly acceded to. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightening cruelties, glorify their hero today and throw him into the gutter tomorrow, it is all the same; the politicians will not cease to vaunt the people's virtues and to bow to their every decision.”

PeopleCrowdsProletariatFrench RevolutionThe MassesWill Of The PeopleJacobin Politics
Book:The Psychology of Revolution
Create image

“So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them.”

CrowdsMass Movements
Book:سيكولوجية الجماهير
Create image

“We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”

MeanIdeasFeelingsIndividualAtheismPersonalityConsciousCrowdsPositive AtheismTendenciesCharacteristicsUnconsciousPrincipalSuggestionsIdenticalDisappearanceContagion
Book:Psychologie des foules
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingMindFirstsRealFactsAcceptingCapableConnectionsRelationSeriesCrowdsObjectivesLogicalImpressedSubjective
Author:Gustave Le Bon
Create image