A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Thomas Carlyle

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Wisdom Believe Collective Collective Wisdom Ignorance Individual

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Thomas Carlyle
Scottish - Philosopher
December 4, 1795 - February 5, 1881

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

H. L. Mencken

Beware of ignorance when in motion; look out for inexperience when in action, and beware of the majority when mentally poisoned with misinformation, for collective ignorance does not become wisdom.

William J. H. Boetcker

I think small groups have more collective wisdom than an individual.

Lewis Schiff

The great creative individual . . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.

John Stuart Mill

The main characteristic of collectivism is that it does not take notice of the individual's will and moral self-determination. In the light of its philosophy the individual is born into a collective and it is "natural" and proper for him to behave as members of this collective are expected to behave. Expected by whom? Of course, by those individuals to whom, by the mysterious decrees of some mysterious agency, the task of determining the collective will and directing the actions of the collective has been entrusted.

Ludwig von Mises

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Ayn Rand

But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.

Ayn Rand

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.

Emile Durkheim

There's this tendency to think of the individual and the collective are somehow at odds or separate. But I think that's really false. We're all both. And when the individual suffers, the collective suffers, and vice versa.

Eula Biss

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

Friedrich August von Hayek

There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.

Rene Dubos

There is not, nor should there be, an irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of an individual person and the interests of the collective.

Joseph Stalin

I also believe that at a critical point (more than six people?), that collective wisdom turns into group think.

Lewis Schiff

It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.

R. H. Tawney

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.

Frederic Bastiat

A Quote by Thomas Carlyle

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