68 Quotes by Gustave Le Bon

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.

To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation.

The explanation is that their science is only a very attenuated form of our universal ignorance.

Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness.

The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognizable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called into question.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence.

The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of its dead or the illusions it has forged itself.

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.