Crowd Psychology Quotes

“The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Corporations and politicians know that they cannot seduce their public into buying what they want them to buy or doing what they want them to do unless they first awaken a sense of need and discontent. Make the masses uncertain about their identity and you can help define it for them. It is as true of groups or nations as it is of individuals.
They can’t be seduced without being made to feel some lack. A group like an individual can get mired in routine losing track of its original goals. Too much prosperity saps it of strength. You can seduce an entire nation by aiming at its collective insecurity, that latent sense that not everything is what it seems. Stirring dissatisfaction with the present and reminding people about the glorious past can unsettle their sense of identity, then you can be the one to redefine it. A grand seduction.”
― Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction