I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a common purpose. Because pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people. But I love individuals.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

The larger the group, the more toxic its culture becomes, because the individual's moral responsibility decreases in direct proportion to the size of the crowd.

Group identity is the anesthesia that allows you to undergo the amputation of your individuality without feeling the pain.

The herd mentality is the ultimate shortcut - it allows you to outsource your thinking, your morality, and your identity at the low price of your soul.

The individual in the crowd loses all sense of their own incompetence. The collective mind makes them feel powerful, permanent, and important.

Every crowd has a collective passion, and the individual in the crowd is swept away by it, losing their critical faculty and capacity for moral judgment.

The herd doesn't think - it feels. And what it feels most strongly is the pleasure of belonging and the terror of exclusion.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

The individual who stands against the crowd is the true revolutionary, for they challenge the most powerful force in human society - the force of conformity.

Groupthink is the process by which intelligent people become collectively stupid in the service of collective harmony.

The crowd is the lie made flesh - the embodiment of shared falsehood that feels more real than individual truth.

When you join a crowd, you don't just add your voice - you subtract your conscience.

The herd offers certainty in exchange for autonomy - a terrible bargain that most people make without realizing the cost.

The first person who compared a crowd to a herd of sheep was a profound thinker; the hundredth person who repeated it was a sheep.

Group identity is the refuge of those who lack the courage to define themselves.