Top 100 The Herd Quotes
#3. She had to stay alert, ready to chivvy any of the hulking beasts who tried to slow down or escape, but now the herd had settled into a steady, drumming rhythm. This
Erin Hunter
#4. I smell panic," said Serge. "These are different animals now. They're starting to winnow out the weak at the fringe of the herd. We need to hurry or this could affect our snack situation.
Tim Dorsey
#5. It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
Henry Miller
#6. My timing is perfect, and I wind up in a traffic jam. The cars around me are driven by fat cows and bellowing bulls. We roll along, six mph. I can run faster than this. We brake. They chew their cud and moo into their phones until the herd shifts gears and rolls forward again.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#7. It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.
Seth Klarman
#8. Are you a stupid sheep in the flock or a free eagle in the sky? Look at the mirror, what are you? Are you some dullish cattle in the herd or a wise owl in the forest? Look at the mirror, what are you?
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#9. The herd instinct is the new chic! It's like belonging to a club! ...
Eugenia Sheppard
#10. Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it begins to simply reward those who reproduce the most and leave the intelligent to become an endangered species.
Mike Judge
#11. The few of understanding, vision rare, Who veiled not from the herd their hearts, but tried, Poor generous fools, to lay their feelings bare, Them have men always burnt and crucified.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#12. Because predators tend to eat the weakest of a species, they keep the remaining population strong. Without predators, herds become weak and disabled. In contrast, when humans hunt animals for trophies, they kill the strongest of the species, thereby weakening the herd.
Stacey O'Brien
#13. Some people have a personality disorder where they just have to go against the herd, right or wrong. They're so committed to their own lone-wolf image that ... Well, put it this way: if the others suddenly came over to their side, they'd switch sides.
Andrew Vachss
#14. The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
Edgar Fiedler
#15. She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
Djuna Barnes
#16. So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.
Carl Jung
#17. We don't punish people because they are evil, but because they make bad choices, choices that are bad for the herd. Morality isn't heaven-sent or eternal, just a set of rules that benefit the herd.
Jo Nesbo
#18. Conflict follows wrongdoing as surely as flies follow the herd.
Doc Holliday
#19. He who seeketh may easily get lost himself. All isolation is wrong": so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd. The voice of the herd will still echo in thee. And when thou sayest, "I have no longer a conscience in common with you," then will it be a plaint and a pain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. I grew up on a ranch and my daddy always said, "If the milk is sour move the herd". Well things have been sour here for a while and getting worse...gotta let (it) go.
Dean Lorey
#21. Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing.
Mary Gaitskill
#22. It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.
Albert Brooks
#24. And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world.
Charles Baudelaire
#25. So you're a little weird? Work it! A little different? OWN it! Better to be a nerd than one of the herd!
Mandy Hale
#26. Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals
for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.
H.P. Lovecraft
#27. (Ah, lovely adolescence - when the "talented" are officially shunted off from the herd, thus putting the total burden of society's creative dreams on the thin shoulders of a few select souls, while condemning everyone else to live a more commonplace, inspiration-free existence! What a system . . . )
Elizabeth Gilbert
#28. One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.
Carl Jung
#29. Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don't even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange.
Gretel Ehrlich
#30. When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd's collective memory.
Jodi Picoult
#31. Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#33. Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.
Dan Rather
#34. This is a paradoxical case where the normally presumed "safety in numbers" is a deadly betrayer instead of a savior. Given a choice, going it alone beats The Buffalo Jump every time, but it's very hard to bolt from the herd.
Matthew Bracken
#35. Our era is one in which individualism has been submerged by the herd-like mentality of a society where conformity, mediocrity and lowered expectations are the norm.
Brian J. D'Souza
#36. Got anything we can cull the herd with?"
Nick stared at Zane for a few seconds. "I never realized how disturbing your accent is until you use cow analogies."
"Yeah okay, say 'car'.
Abigail Roux
#37. Egregious.
most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. it has a much more interesting story than that to tell. it means "outside the herd."
imagine that - thousands of people, outside the herd.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. A hungry wolf at all the herd will run, In hopes, through many, to make sure of one.
William Congreve
#39. Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.
Antony C. Sutton
#40. This process of cutting a potential wife from the herd was proving far more difficult than he'd thought.
Debra Holland
#41. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#42. The awe-inspiring beauty of nature is nothing more than being flabbergasted by our ignorance of it. Good art produces the same effect; and the worst thing an artist can do is to follow the herd, because domesticated art is about as dynamic as a domesticated animal.
Anthony Marais
#43. In a moment of acute anxiety a year earlier, John Adams had wondered what would happen if "the multitude, the vulgar, the herd, the rabble" maintained such open defiance of authority. 13
Ron Chernow
#46. If you are honest, you are in the minority; if you are clever, you are in the minority; if you do not believe in any religious craps, you are in the minority! If you are not in the herd, you are in the minority! What a glorious privilege to be in this kind of minorities!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#48. Because you are the superhero fledgling. I'm just your more attractive sidekick. Oh, and the herd of nerds are your dorky minions.
P.C. Cast
#49. I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.
Henry David Thoreau
#50. If you're going to follow your bliss and make a difference in the world, you'll soon learn that you can't follow the herd.
Wayne Dyer
#51. Cornut knew that that was what the immortals wanted. They had kept their herd of contended, helpless, shortlived cattle long enough. The herd had prospered until it competed with its unseen owners for food and space. Like any good husbandman, the immortals had decided to thin the herd out.
Frederik Pohl
#52. The fact is that they always go after your weakest point - the wolves chase down the weakest sheep in the herd.
Haruki Murakami
#53. True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#54. Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
Charlie Munger
#55. You just never give up, no matter how hard the challenges are, and observe this world with a healthy dose of criticism and don't just follow the herd like somebody else might do.
Renny Harlin
#56. Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else ...
H.P. Lovecraft
#57. The Almighty implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of His image in our heart. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals.
Thomas Paine
#58. I don't live by a lot of society's rules; I can't pattern myself after the herd.
Kim Basinger
#59. Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes- and most fools do- but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one's mistakes.
Dale Carnegie
#61. Don't be bitter and mean 'couse you don't fit in, it's a GIFT. Look at you. you've got your individuality, you don't have the herd instinct, you can read Neitzsche and understand it. Only dumb people are happy.
Courtney Love
#62. It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.
Neal Barnard
#63. Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#65. The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.
Matt Taibbi
#66. He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All solitude is wrong: so say the herd. And long did you belong to the herd.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#67. But far more numerous was the herd of such,
Who think too little, and who talk too much.
John Dryden
#68. There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.
Erica Jong
#69. If all you do is follow the herd, you'll just be stepping in poop all day
Wayne Dyer
#70. There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#71. If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike.
Henry Miller
#72. The herd will be gathered together and tamed again, however, and this time for good. And then we shall give them tranquil, humble happiness, suitable for such weak creatures.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#73. The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
Albert Einstein
#74. Think outside the square. Think for yourself don't just follow the herd. Think multidisciplinary! Problems by definition, cross many academic disciplines.
Lucas Remmerswaal
#75. Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd.
Marty Rubin
#76. the group, the herd, which is any collection of children
John Steinbeck
#77. Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#78. In a world grown dark with deceit there there are many who are blinded and few who can hold up a light so that we can see the way. More important, so that we can look at ourselves, as well as others, and know how similar we are to the herd.
F. Sionil Jose
#79. She barely understands her dreams of belly button rings and other kind of things. Symbolic of change, but the thing that is strange, it that the changes occur, and now she's just a part of the herd.
Jack Johnson
#80. Isn't there such a thing as social liberation?" "Of course there is," said the Master. "How would you describe it?" "Liberation from the need to belong to the herd.
Anthony De Mello
#81. The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable-it's that implacable-herd expression.
David Foster Wallace
#82. Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set?
Alexander McCall Smith
#83. I think that most people would associate big schools of fish with healthy coral reefs. At Kingman, the predators keep the herd thin, so there aren't a lot of big fish schools.
Brian Skerry
#84. That's precisely what my novel is about. It's called Demons, and it's a description of how these demons entered the herd of swine.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#85. I'd like to avoid the environmental apocalypse if I could. Zombies, robots - I don't know - I'd probably do alright hidden in the middle of the herd and sacrificing people to keep myself alive, but where you gonna hide when all the food is gone?
Ben Peek
#86. I stayed on my own path and did not follow the herd. I made a way for myself.
Eartha Kitt
#87. But the average person doesnt have that much imagination. They just want to be entertained. They want to have the tableau presented for them. They dont want to participate beyond a certain point. They want the safety of the herd, to be catered to, sit back and enjoy.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#88. A farmer slaughters his cattle because he must eat to survive, but he also protects the herd from thieves and predators. If you leave the pen, the wolves will find you, child.
Rachel Vincent
#89. The perpetrators of genocides are usually men of the herd, men who follow orders without questioning them. Rwanda was no exception.
John Rucyahana
#90. The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.
Lord Chesterfield
#91. Who o'er the herd would wish to reign, Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain! Vain as the leaf upon the stream, And fickle as a changeful dream; Fantastic as a woman's mood, And fierce as Frenzy's fever'd blood. Thou many-headed monster thing, Oh who would wish to be thy king!
Walter Scott
#92. Don't just follow the herd. Be like a bird. Open your wings and fly high in the sky!-RVM
R.v.m.
#93. You don't have to watch many wildlife documentaries to know that the herd doesn't accept the lone straggler.
Holly Goldberg Sloan
#94. I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."
Renata Adler
#95. If you're ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there
Will Rogers
#96. People didn't want to disturb norms. If one looked like they fit into the greater scheme of things, then it took a kind of courage to step away from the herd and stand out, challenging that.
Wildbow
#97. The herd instinct seems to be the strongest human emotion, one that the race is constantly breeding off as the mavericks are liquidated. Happiness is running with the crowd.
John Train
#98. Most people instinctively follow a dominant trend in an organization or community, without critical evaluation of its merits. The herd instinct is strong.
Ronald A. Heifetz
#99. Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.
Aaron Hill
#100. Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.
Gustave Flaubert
