The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Interpretation
The collective imagination of a crowd can be easily influenced.
Edgar Allan Poe suggests that a mob's opinions and feelings are driven by their imagination, rather than rational thought. This idea implies that if a leader can tap into the collective imagination of a crowd, they can guide or manipulate the crowd's behavior with relative ease.
In practice
During a political rally, one might cite this quote to illustrate how leaders can sway public opinion.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication-- Steve Jobs turned this into the slogan behind an early Mac advertising campaign. Which doesn't make it less true.
Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.
What people donβt realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
Like the practice of breath control, meditation on the forms of God, repetition of mantras, food restrictions, etc., are but aids for rendering the mind quiescent.
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