“Groups are capable of being as moral and inteligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own, and is capable of anything except inteligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

“Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.”

“... the moral is plain. Avoid, if possible, being bored yourself or boring others.”

“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

“As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.”

“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”