The Mass Quotes

“From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“Dead towns are the Cathedrals of Silence. They, too, have their gargoyles, singular figures, exaggerated, dubious, set in high profile. They stand out from the mass of grey, which takes all it has in the way of character, its twitchings of stagnant life from them. Some have been distorted by solitude, others grimace with a directionless fervour; here there are masks of cherished lust, there faces ceaselessly sculpted and furrowed by mysticism. Human gargoyles, the only figures of interest in this monotonous population.”

— Georges Rodenbach

“They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea
all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.”

— John Varley

“On one side, the mass of a mountain. A life I know.
On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it seems empty to us. Too much space.”

— Philippe Petit

“The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that's being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won't approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We've no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.”

— Poul Anderson

“So great was the mass of information forced upon the student, that he had no time to think of the mutual implications of the various branches of his knowledge.”

— Olaf Stapledon

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“The mass of man lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation, is confirmed desperation.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.”

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“You wanted magic, watch". She put her hand into the struggling mass of insects and made a shrill faint piping noise in the back of her throat. There was a movement in the mass, and a large bee lander and flatter then the others crawled onto her hand. A few workers followed it stroking it and generally ministering to it.
"How did you do that" said Esk.
"Ahhh," said Granny, "wouldn't you like to know".
"Yes I would that's why I asked Granny," said Esk severely.
"Do you think I used magic", Esk looked down at the queen bee, then up at the witch.
"No, I think you just know a lot about bees".
Granny grinned, "Exactly correct, that's one form of magic of course".
"What just knowing things".
"Knowing things that other people don't know," said Granny”

— Terry Pratchett

“Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some-such as Josie, Jim, and Ben-to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers,-barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.”

— Bell Hooks

“Rock musicians, and a vast array of popular-music musicians, due to their wealth, acquired through the mass of their notoriety, are able to be listened to and heard and thus are able to effect change on an international level.”

— Bill Dixon

“Strictly speaking, intensity in the weight training context refers to the amount of work required to achieve the activity and is proportional to the mass of the weights being lifted - that is, how heavy the weight is relative to how strong you are.”

— John Romaniello

“Still, he could not think of the mass of Moroccans without contempt. He had no patience with their ignorance and backwardness; if he damned the Europeans with one breath, he was bound to damn the Moroccans with the next. No one escaped but him, and that was because he hated himself most of all.”

— Paul Bowles

“In the 'Mass Effect' universe, there is zero ad libbing.”

— Jennifer Hale

“Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”

— Denis Diderot

“Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born?”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.”

— Marilyn French

“I'm an old dog; I don't get too excited. I don't get caught up in all the mass hysteria.”

— Tim Howard

“The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.”

— C.G. Jung

“The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which ... pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.”

— J. F. C. Fuller

“Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.”

— David Riesman

“The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.”

— Gene Cernan

“The mass media are class media.”

— Michael Pare

“Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.”

— Theodore Parker

“Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision.”

— Walter A. Shewhart

“The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya, and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.”

— Yitzhak Shamir

“Since 1960, there have been more plastic syringes available than anyone could need. And yet, for the decades since then, WHO has done NOTHING to stop the spread of vicious diseases that result from the mass re-use of dirty needles.”

— Jon Rappoport

“In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.”

— A. N. Wilson

“Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.”

— David Hockney

“The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional incentive.”

— Jane Addams

“Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men; ... Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life
production, politics, and education
rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.”

— Emma Goldman

“There are plenty of things that are unknown, but are assumed reasonably to exist, even in the most basic sciences. Maybe 90 percent of the mass-energy in the universe is called "dark," because nobody knows what it is.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes
the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“The mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness; the superior man exults in his gloom.”

— Garrison Keillor

“The key to seeing why there should be a Eucharistic worship distinct from the Mass is that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. No less than His contemporaries in Palestine adored and implored Him for the favors they needed, so we should praise, thank Him, and implore Him for what we need.”

— Pope Pius XII

“Certainly we do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas: first, because we do not believe in the mass at all, but abhor it, whether it be said or sung in Latin or in English; and, secondly, because we find no Scriptural warrant whatever for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior; and, consequently, its observance is a superstition, because not of divine authority.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.”

— Loren Eiseley

“The Penny Post will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.”

— Harriet Martineau

“Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.”

— Henri Frederic Amiel

“We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day by the mass of people acting in harmony as if by instinct. If they were instinctively violent, the world would end in no time.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly discern that by so acting they will inevitably create misery to themselves.”

— Robert Owen