Gustave Le Bon

Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics.

It forms a single being, and is subjected to the Law of the Mental Unity of Crowds.

Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.

All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed.

Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic.

Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

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

Finally we saw that great historical perturbations are the result, as a rule, of changes in these fundamental ideas.