The Revolt of the Masses

“Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder … is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary.”

“The mass is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.”

“The select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself than the rest.”

“The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection, mere buoys that float on the waves.”

“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”

“That man is intellectually of the mass who, in the face of any problem, is satisfied with thinking the first thing he finds in his head. On the contrary, the excellent man is he who condemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.”

“For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man—not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia.”

“The individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration.”

“The man of sense … is constantly catching himself within an inch of being a fool; hence he makes an effort to escape from the imminent folly, and in that effort lies his intelligence. The fool, on the other hand, does not suspect himself; he thinks himself the most prudent of men, hence the enviable tranquility with which the fool settles down, installs himself with his own folly.”

“There is no way of dislodging the fool from his folly, to take him away for a while from his blind state and to force him to contrast his own dull vision with other keener forms of sight. The fool is a fool for life; he is devoid of pores.”

“The mass man … accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere.”

“It is painful to hear relatively cultured people speak concerning the most elementary problems of the day. They seem like rough farmhands trying with thick, clumsy fingers to pick up a needle lying on a table.”

“Experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre … to obtain quite abundant results it is not even necessary to have rigorous notions of their meaning and foundations.”

“Previously men could be divided into the learned and the unlearned, … But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these categories … We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned.”

“This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: state intervention.”

“The majority of men have no opinions, and these have to be pumped into them from outside, like lubricants into machinery.”

“This degradation is nothing else than the acceptance, as a normal, constituted condition, of an irregularity, of something which, though accepted, is still regarded as not right. As it is impossible to change into healthy normality what is of its essence unhealthy and abnormal,. the individual decides to adapt himself to the thing that is wrong, making himself part of the crime of irregularity. It is a mechanism similar to that indicated by the popular saying, “One lie make a hundred.””

“The apparent egoism of great nations and great men is the inevitable sternness with which anyone who has his life fixed on some undertaking must bear himself. When we are really going to do something and have dedicated ourselves to a purpose, we cannot be expected to be ready at hand to look after every passer-by and to lend ourselves to every chance display of altruism.”

“A creative life implies a regime of strict mental health, of high conduct, of constant stimulus, which keep active the consciousness of man’s dignity.”

“A creative life is an energetic life, and this is only possible in one or the other of these two situations: either being the one who rules, or finding oneself placed in a world which is ruled by someone in whom we recognize full right to such a function: either I rule or I obey. By obedience I do not mean mere submission—this is degradation—but on the contrary, respect for the ruler and acceptance of his leadership, solidarity with him, and enthusiastic enrollment under his banner.”

“He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.”

“The majority of men of science have given themselves to it through fear of facing life. They are not clear heads; hence their notorious ineptitude in the presence of any concrete situation.”

“Our scientific ideas are of value to the degree to which we have felt ourselves lost before a question; have seen its problematic nature, and have realized that we cannot find support in received notions, in prescriptions, proverbs, mere words.”

“The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.”