"It isn't an instinct or a need-being in a crowd isn't necesary to our being complete human beings-but, for most of us, the crowd holds out certain essential attractions. It is, like an appetite, something in which dark satisfactions can be found."
- page 249 of Among the Thugs
"We evolved as social animals and sociability lies at the heart of our biological condition. It is our instinct to act collectively that has been the key to our survival and success as a species."
- Greg Newbold
"Having fled in panic, some of the supporters would then remember that they were English and that this was important, and they would remind the others that they too were English, and this was also important, and, with a renewed sense of national identity, they would come abruptly to a halt, turn around, and charge the Italian police, stones would be thrown, people would be felled, until the police contrived to regroup and again gave chase."
- page 297 of Among the Thugs
"This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion, and at the same time the destruction of general beliefs, have had for final result an extreme divergence of convictions of every order, and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to everything that does not plainly touch their immediate interests."
- Gustave LeBon
"As the first supporters pushed open the doors, they would have been greeted by two husky German shepherds going for their throats. Two dog handlers-there were no other police-had turned back a chanting mob of a thousand people intent on violence."
- page 124 of Among the Thugs
"The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties."
- H.L. Mencken
"A crowd reveals our Darwinian selves, primal hordes suddenly liberated by the sway of the pack. A crowd reveals our Freudian selves, regressing to a state of elemental, primitive urgency. A crowd killed Socrates; a crowd killed Jesus."
- page 183 of Among the Thugs
"By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian that is a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images-which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd-and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."
- Gustave LeBon
"The group crossed a street, a major intersection. It had long abandoned the pretense of invisibility and had reverted to the arrogant identity of the violent crowd, walking, without hesitation, straight into the congested traffic, across the hoods of the cars, knowing that they would stop."
- page 89 of Among the Thugs
"The mob have neither judgment nor principle, ready to brawl at night for the reverse of what they desired in the morning."
