Mindless Sheep Quotes

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Muslims need to wake up. They also need to start drinking wine, embrace any and all homoerotic tendencies, write some poetry and for the most part free themselves from the fundamentalist chains they have created (for themselves and everyone else!). The Muslim world will only be free when bars fill the streets and women show off their natural, feminine beauty. Muslims need to grow up and stop expecting everyone to be mindless sheep before a 1,400-year-old oral tradition. Nakedness will free Dar-el-Islam!

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves- either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

That’s what happens when the rot comes from the top. People turn into mindless sheep.

If I start doing more things with my hands, whether that's woodworking or gardening or knitting or baking cookies, I might fall into the condition made famous by the psychologist with the impossible name: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That condition is "flow." It means becoming completely involved in an activity not for the sake of the outcome but for the sheer joy of it. It means feeling alive when we are fully in the groove of doing something. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the path to greatest happiness lies not with mindless consuming but with challenging ourselves to experience or produce something new, becoming in the process more engaged, connected and alive.

There is one hour in his life when we see a flash of utter physical action on Christ's part, an hour when this most curious of men must have experienced the sheer joyous exuberance of a young mammal in full flight: when he lets himself go and flings over the first money changer's table in the Temple at Jerusalem, coins flying, doves thrashing into the air, oxen bellowing, sheep yowling, the money changer going head-over-teakettle, all heads turning, what the...? You don't think Christ got a shot of utter childlike physical glee at that moment? Too late to stop now, his rage rushing to his head, his veiny carpenter's-son wiry arms and hard feet milling as he whizzes through the Temple overturning tables, smashing birdcages, probably popping a furious money-changer here and there with a quick left jab or a well-placed Divine Right Elbow to the money-lending teeth, whipping his scourge of cords against the billboard-size flank of an ox, men scrambling to get out of the way, to grab some of the flying coins, to get a punch in on this nutty rube causing all the ruckus... In all this holy rage and chaos, don't you think there was a little absolute boyish mindless physical jittery joy in the guy?

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

Our futures, our freedoms, our independence and most importantly of all, our will. We’re all mindless little sheep, bobbing along, content merely to survive for another day or two. We are so afraid of everything, of losing what we have, that we fail to notice that the men in charge have already taken from us everything that matters.

They had loved each other, but never slept together. Valentine had been pleased to hear it when Miro told her, though he said it with angry regret. Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society’s norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves—either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

Corny as it sounds, I believe that unless we try to familiarize ourselves with the best that human beings have thought and accomplished, we doom ourselves to be little more than mindless consumer-wraiths, docile sheep waiting to be shorn by corporation or government, sad and confused dwellers on the threshold of a palace we never enter.

Corny as it sounds, I believe that unless we try to familiarize ourselves with the best that human beings have thought and accomplished, we doom ourselves to be little more than mindless consumer-wraiths, docile sheep waiting to be shorn by corporation or government, sad and confused dwellers on the threshold of a palace we never enter.

You know the way the world works?” Brian asked. It’s like that old Warner Bros. cartoon with Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog. All day long, Ralph tried to eat the sheep, and all day long, Sam beat the crap out of Ralph. The sheep were clueless. They just stood around, mindlessly eating grass. And then the work whistle blew, and Sam and Ralph punched out and walked off for a beer: best pals, two sides of the same system.

Mindless conformity is what turns us from humans into sheep.

Mindless conformity is what turns us from humans into sheep. People have been beaten to death in front of crowds that could easily overtake the attacker. The bigger the crowd, the more likely it is that nobody will intervene. The principle is called "diffusion of responsibility," and boils down to the pressure for conformity overwhelming the need to act. Any guilt over not acting is shared between the people not acting. You didn't stand by and watch someone get killed, after all. It was a crowd of 1000. You only stood around to the tune of 0.1% of the incident as a whole. If your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump too?

Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society’s norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves—either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.

Wherever pockets of humanity wander meek and lost; where citizens are seen as merely sheep to be herded; we will always find those who feast on lamb. Where barricades are raised against man’s hunger for truth, we will always find mindless brutality. Wherever individuality, the mind, and the truth are held back; where lives are lived in empty conformity; there will be many who ache, but who know not what for. - From “The Soul Hides in Shadows

I overhear the soldiers whispering. That terrorist looks a bit butch. They laugh. I turn to glare right into their mindless sheep eyes and they stiffen, pretend they don't see me. Miserable fools. What do they know about women? They probably call me butch because of my short hair. They don't know the feminine is the origin of everything. It's ferment, magma, purification, creation. The dawn that will rise when the revolution is complete.