Gustave Le Bon

which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution-in women, savages, and children, for instance.

In consequence, a crowd perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous. The improbable does not exist for a crowd, and it is necessary to bear this circumstance well in mind to understand the facility with which are created and propagated the most improbable legends and stories.

every civilisation is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed