Civilization Quote by Gustave Le Bon

““A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.””

Gustave Le Bon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.4 out of 5 (7 ratings)

Civilization Crowds Decline Faith Indifference Lack of respect The-masses Time

More by Gustave Le Bon

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

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

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

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

Image

“If one destroyed in museums and libraries, if one hurled down on the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

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

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“The work of a crowd is always inferior, whatever its nature, to that of an isolated individual.”

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“Expressions such as infamous capital, vile exploiters, the admirable working man, the socialisation of wealth, &c., always produce the same effect, although already somewhat…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

“Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity…

Gustave Le Bon

Image

Explore all 52 Gustave Le Bon quotes

More Civilization quotes

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and…

Octavio Paz

Image

Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on…

Judith Ellen Foster

Image

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

Image

We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000…

Julian Assange

Image

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been…

Ernest Hemingway

Image

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a…

Carl Jung

Image

The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing…

Carl von Clausewitz

Image

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power…

Ralph Waldo Emerson