Quotes & Sayings About Mass Hysteria

Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria! — Ernest Cline

Global warming is the most prominent form of mass hysteria raging across the world today. — Doug Casey

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening. — Beryl Markham

Having a gut instinct that told me how to be a moral person might be evolutionarily handy. On the other hand, emotional moral judgment also enables people to do really horrible things to each other, like lynching or "honor" killings, and justify them by calling them "moral." Because sociopaths don't experience morality emotionally, I would argue that we are freed to be more rational and more tolerant. There is something to be said for the impartiality of pure reason - religion-created mass hysteria among the supposedly mentally healthy populace has resulted in much worse damage and carnage in the world than anything sociopaths have caused. (Although I imagine that there may sometimes be sociopaths at the head of it all, whipping up the masses to do their bidding.) — M.E. Thomas

Disasters have a way of making us stronger in the broken places.
— James Lee Witt

It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded - without being insane. — Michael Lewis

I believe in anything that causes mass hysteria in children. — Robby Takac

December is celebrated quite heartily here in the United States. Aggresively, one might say. Every conceivable space is corseted with strands of twinkle lights, buildings are smothered beneath greenery, and a mass mania for erecting oversized, inflatable, waving "snowmen" in front of homes erupts amid the populace. It's quite a hysteria- and the evergreen trees are not just a myth, Vasile. People really do purchase them, in abundance. They are for sale everywhere. Imagine paying for the privilege of dragging a filthy piece of forest into your living area for the purpose of bedecking it with glass balls and staring at it.
Why a tree? If one needed to display glass balls-and I highly discorage it-why not just a case of some sort? A rack? — Beth Fantaskey

Everything occurred in phases. The "Holy Crap, We're Dead!" phase was marked by mass hysteria. Mass euphoria resulted from the "Holy Crap, We're Free of Life's Burdens!" phase. Now things had shifted into the "Holy Crap, We Can Do Whatever We Want!" phase in which mass indulgence made the ancient Romans look like teetotalers. — John Corwin

The pain didn't bother me. In fact, I welcome it: It meant I was alive. — Darren Shan

Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda. — Martin Amis

There was mass hysteria in the Chess Recording Studio when I did the "Shapes of Things" solo ... they weren't expecting it, and it was just some weird mist coming from the East out of an amp. — Jeff Beck

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me. — Siri Hustvedt

The majority is by no means omniscient just because it is the majority. In fact, I've found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible. — J. Paul Getty

The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game. — Knute Rockne

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

When the media enjoy such excessive profits from this mass hysteria, what incentive do they have to restrain it? — T. Rafael Cimino

PICKERING:Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS [moodily]:Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned? — George Bernard Shaw

I feel as if I am living in a time of mass hysteria where it is very hard to get people to ask the simplest, most common-sense questions like: "Say, how did you board a plane to Moscow or plan to go to Cuba without showing pre-ordered visas, which you must obtain as an American to enter these countries? — Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

If a person takes comfort in his or her faith upon divinity in times of distress, then who the hell am I to say, that the person is delusional. — Abhijit Naskar

mitochondria and the ribosomes and the chloroplasts and the endoplasmic reticulum. — Belle Payton

The Conservative Party has one overriding concern in foreign policy, and that is the growth of Communist power and influence in the world, and the dangers it can bring for all of us. — Reginald Maudling

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. — Neal Stephenson

All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous. — Paula McLain

When the news of the creature broke, it was possible that the victims had attributed to the Monkeyman injuries that they had unknowingly inflicted on themselves in their sleep.

'It could be mass hysteria caused by mass media,' he concluded.

Dr. Desai's report lay on my desk for many days: a snap-shot of a city splintering under the strain of a fundamental urban reconfiguration- a city of the exhausted, distressed, and restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment; a city of twenty million histrionic personas resiliently absorbing the day's glancing blows only to return home and tenderly claw themselves to sleep. — Aman Sethi

Among the millions of North Koreans who took part in the mass display of grief for Kim Il-sung, how many were faking? Were they crying for the death of the Great Leader or for themselves? Or were they crying because everybody else was? If there is one lesson taught by scholars of mass behavior, from the historians of the Salem witch hunts to Charles Mackay, author of the classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, hysteria is infectious. In the middle of a crowd of crying people, the only natural human reaction is to cry oneself. — Barbara Demick

Go and copulate with yon purple lizard. — Roger Zelazny

Great life, great deeds.
Great deeds, great blessings. — Lailah Gifty Akita

And to see the white flash of Klaus's eyes as he whirled on her. For one stunned instant she stared at him, and then lightning crackled.
From an empty sky. — L.J.Smith