Many men easily do without truth, but none is strong enough to do without illusions.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
(Attributed)
Quotations by:
LeBon, Gustave
Force can command obedience, but prestige removes even the idea of disobedience.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
Aphorisms of Present Times, 1.8 (1913) [tr. Widener (1979)]
Law and Justice play no role in the relations of peoples of unequal strength.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
Aphorisms of Present Times, 2.6 (1913)
All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
Psychologie des foules (1895)
(also attrib Jean de la Fontaine, Fables (1668))
There is a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to the gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women … recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution, and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
Revue d’Anthropologie (1879)
In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1.1 (1895)
The crowd demands a god before everything else.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1.4 (1895)
The arousing of faith — whether religious, political, or social, whether faith in a work, in a person, or in an idea — has always been the function of the great leaders of crowds. … To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength tenfold.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 2.3.1 (1895)
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) German psychologist
The Crowd, 2.2.2 (1895)