Gustav Le Bon Quotes

“Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.”
― George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich

“It is important to distinguish between ideology and what really happens in the world. When our heads are stuffed with ideology, our expectations are those of a fool. When we look at reality without ideology, we see something that is generally outside our expectations. Ideology and reality belong to different realms. Ideology belongs to the childish side of the imagination, while reality is the realm of the wise. The two things, ideology and reality, never coincide, ever. The reasons were outlined by Gustav Le Bon in his study of crowd behavior, where he stated: "The philosophic absurdity that often marks general beliefs has never been an obstacle to their triumph.... In consequence, the evident weakness of the socialist beliefs of today will not prevent their triumph among the masses.... The socialist ideal of happiness [and] ... the vanity of its promises will at once appear as soon as the first efforts toward their realization are made...."
J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R.Nyquist