Collective Quotes

As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

What does not benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee.

Never forget that when we are silent, we are one. And when we speak we are two.

And no, we don't know where it will lead. We just know there's something much bigger than any of us here.

Our people outside of prison used my name to mobilize the community locally and internationally. But for me to be treated separately from my colleagues, who had contributed as much as and even more than I had, would have been a betrayal of them.

Nobody can enjoy unless we all enjoy, truly enjoy.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . .

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible.

... inherited collective mind-patterns ... have kept humans in bondage to suffering for eons.

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

We recall the joy and excitement of a nation that had found itself, the collective relief that we had stepped out of our restrictive past, and the expectant air of walking into a brighter future.

What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.