Top 80 Gustave Le Bon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

— Gustave Le Bon

2. “Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas.”

— Gustave Le Bon

3. “A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.”

— Gustave Le Bon

4. “One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.”

— Gustave Le Bon

5. “In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.”

— Gustave Le Bon

6. “The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.”

— Gustave Le Bon

7. “All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.”

— Gustave Le Bon

8. “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.”

— Gustave Le Bon

9. “The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.”

— Gustave Le Bon

10. “The role of the scholar is to destroy chimeras, that of the statesman is to make use of them.”

— Gustave Le Bon

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

— Gustave Le Bon

12. “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.”

— Gustave Le Bon

13. “The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life.”

— Gustave Le Bon

14. “If atheism spread, it would become a religion as intolerable as the ancient ones.”

— Gustave Le Bon

15. “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

— Gustave Le Bon

16. “The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalisation of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them.”

— Gustave Le Bon

17. “The influence of the leaders is due in very small measure to the arguments they employ, but in a large degree to their prestige. The best proof of this is that, should they by any circumstance lose their prestige, their influence disappears.”

— Gustave Le Bon

18. “Muhammad is the greatest man that history ever knew.”

— Gustave Le Bon

19. “The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.”

— Gustave Le Bon

20. “Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?”

— Gustave Le Bon

21. “The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.”

— Gustave Le Bon

22. “Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.”

— Gustave Le Bon

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

— Gustave Le Bon

24. “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.”

— Gustave Le Bon

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

— Gustave Le Bon

26. “Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.”

— Gustave Le Bon

27. “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.”

— Gustave Le Bon

28. “History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.”

— Gustave Le Bon

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

— Gustave Le Bon

30. “Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige.”

— Gustave Le Bon

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

— Gustave Le Bon

32. “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.”

— Gustave Le Bon

33. “Acquired or artificial prestige is much the most common. The mere fact that an individual occupies a certain position, possesses a certain fortune, or bears certain titles, endows him with prestige, however slight his own personal worth.”

— Gustave Le Bon

34. “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.”

— Gustave Le Bon

35. “Man, like animals, has a natural tendency to imitation. Imitation is a necessity for him, provided always that the imitation is quite easy. It is this necessity that makes the influence of what is called fashion so powerful. Whether in the matter of opinions, ideas, literary manifestations, or merely of dress, how many persons are bold enough to run counter to the fashion?”

— Gustave Le Bon

36. “Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.”

— Gustave Le Bon

37. “It is clear, then,” he says, “that witnesses even in number may give circumstantial relations which are completely erroneous, but whose result is that, if their descriptions are accepted as exact, the phenomena they describe are inexplicable by trickery.”

— Gustave Le Bon

38. “Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs.”

— Gustave Le Bon

39. “So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality; yet there are other acts in which they appear to be guided by those mysterious forces which the ancients denominated destiny, nature, or providence, which we call the voices of the dead, and whose power it is impossible to overlook, although we ignore their essence. It would seem, at times, as if there were latent forces in the inner being of nations which serve to guide them.”

— Gustave Le Bon

40. “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”

— Gustave Le Bon

41. “Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture – all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising.”

— Gustave Le Bon

42. “Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.”

— Gustave Le Bon

43. “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.”

— Gustave Le Bon

44. “Peoples are governed by their character, and all institutions which are not intimately modelled on that character merely represent a borrowed garment, a transitory disguise.”

— Gustave Le Bon

45. “To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises, because it cannot lie.”

— Gustave Le Bon

46. “La multitud escucha siempre al hombre dotado de una fuerte voluntad. Ya que los individuos reunidos en masa pierden toda voluntad, se tornan instintivamente hacia aquel que la posee.”

— Gustave Le Bon

47. “The modern age is the triumph of collective mediocrity.”

— Gustave Le Bon

48. “To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength tenfold. The great events of history have been brought about by obscure believers, who have had little beyond their faith in their favour. It is not by the aid of the learned or of philosophers, and still less of sceptics, that have been built up the great religions which have swayed the world, or the vast empires which have spread from one hemisphere to the other.”

— Gustave Le Bon

49. “La raza y la esclavitud de nuestras necesidades cotidianas son las misteriosas causas maestras que gobiernan nuestro destino.”

— Gustave Le Bon

50. “While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS.”

— Gustave Le Bon