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3b807ff
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History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.
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masses
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Scott Westerfeld |
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bf1e67c
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Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring -- but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.
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inarticulate
masses
wad
shibumi
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Trevanian |
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f08f038
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But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice
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groupthink
masses
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Ayn Rand |
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0293777
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Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.
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living
follower
mob-rule
masses
slave
master
leader
society
democracy
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Ayn Rand |
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fb3c64c
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"He said, 'You have to understand, I'm an academic. I'm not trained in dealing with masses of people. I found out through the school of hard knocks that it is better not to deal with masses of people. It's not that they don't deserve the information but they really react in very strange ways. They get panicky and excited, or over-excited, and it is so easy for academics to forget that. We're trained in math. We're trained in science. We're not trained in the masses.' He paused. 'The public is extremely wild,' he said, 'uncontrollably wild.'
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masses
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Jon Ronson |