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Gustave Le Bon Biography

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon (French: [ɡystav lə bɔ̃]; 7 May 1841 – 13 December 1931) was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.

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Gustave Le Bon Quotes

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.

Atheism, Button, Independent, People, Remaining

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.

Belief, Moment, Moments, Nihilism, Precise, Question

Crowds are influenced mainly by images produced by the judicious employment of words and formulas

Employment, Crowds, Formulas, Mainly, Influenced

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

Conscious, Importance, Mind, Unconscious

We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

Mean, Ideas, Personality, Acts, Forming, Disappearance

All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.

Civilization, People, Intellectual, Crowds

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

Ancient, Atheism, Atheist, Become, Intolerable

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.

Atheism, Desire, Savages, Mobile, Like

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.

Devoured, Offered, People, Psychology, Solution, Sphinx

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

Enemies, Giving, Society, Trouble, Worst Enemy

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first. . . A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts. . . . Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

Real, Thinking, Mind, Connection, Scarcely

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

Political, Role, Roles, Scholar, Statesman, Use

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.

Atheism, Degrees, Due, Leader, Leaders, Proof

At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.

Blood, Capable, Echoes, Force, Men, Voice