“A celebrity collects a chorus of voices... as long as there are enough of them and they are versed in his name, it does not matter whether these voices belong to the dead, to the living, or to the as yet unborn.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The more people were bound together... and the more closed the form... the more violent the disintegration.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“Within the crowd there is equality [and] for the sake of this equality people become a crowd and tend to overlook anything which might detract from it.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The crowd is the same everywhere... Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The Englishman likes to imagine himself at sea, the German in a forest. It is impossible to express the difference of their national feeling more concisely.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The family becomes rigid and hard when it excludes others... The 'family' of two is man's most contemptible creation.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“It is the deception of all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in reality, they send their people to death... Enemies he can use openly; that is why he has enemies. His own people must be used secretly.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The hallucinations of alcoholics provide us with an opportunity to study crowds as they appear in the minds of individuals.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“What is it that happens in an inflation? The unit of money suddenly loses its identity.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The crowd is like a besieged city and, as in many sieges, it has enemies before its walls and enemies within them.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The more fiercely each man 'fights for his life', the clearer it becomes that he is fighting against all the others who hem him in.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“As in all religions, invisible crowds are of the greatest importance, but in Islam, more strongly than in any of the other world religions, these are invisible, double crowds, standing in opposition to each other.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“'Mohammed' says one of the greatest experts on Islam (I. Goldziher) 'is the prophet of fighting and of war... What matters to the fighters for Islam is not so much the conversion as the subjection of infidels.' The Koran, the book of the prophet inspired by God, leaves no doubt of this.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“Islam exhibits all the unmistakable traits of a religion of war, but it has, nevertheless, branched out into a religion of lament more concentrated and more extreme than any to be found elsewhere: the faith of the Shiites, the official religion of Iran and Yemen, and strongly represented in India and Iraq.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“From whatever aspect we consider the command, we can now see that, in the compact and perfected form it has acquired... it is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand against it and break its tyranny.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery... the single slave, linked to his master as a dog is, and numbers of slaves together, like cattle in a field”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“Once men succeeded in collecting large numbers of slaves, the foundations for the tyranny of the state were laid. Nor is there the slightest doubt that a ruler's desire to own a whole people like slaves or animals grows stronger as their numbers increase.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“A rich man collects cattle and hoards of grain, or the money which stands for them. He does not worry about men; it is enough that he can buy them.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“A ruler collects men. Grain and cattle, or money, mean nothing to him except in as far as he needs them to get hold of men.”

from Crowds and Power (1960)

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“Elias Canetti, a novelist and social philosopher often written off as one of those offbeat mid-century central European thinkers no one knows quite what to do with... had put his finger on something important, something almost everyone else had overlooked. Very large social units are aways, in a sense, imaginary... there is aways a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friend and famiiy, people and place that we actually know directly and the way one relates to nations and metropoises”

— ​David Graeber 1961 – 2020 CE
Pioneering reshaper and insightful commentator on understanding the modern world
from Dawn of Everything

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