"A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason"
About this Quote
Alger’s line is a neatly sharpened warning about democracy’s soft underbelly: the moment we become “a crowd,” we don’t just add numbers, we trade cognition for contagion. The phrasing is absolute - “always,” “never” - because the point isn’t sociological nuance; it’s moral pressure. He’s trying to make the reader feel how quickly individual judgment dissolves into a shared mood, how sympathy can become a kind of substitute brain that tells everyone what to feel before anyone has asked what’s true.
“Sympathy” is the trapdoor word. Alger isn’t condemning compassion as such; he’s condemning compassion when it’s unaccountable. Sympathy feels ethical, even noble, so it gives mass opinion a self-justifying glow. In a crowd, caring becomes a credential: if you’re moved, you’re “right.” That’s how sentiment can launder rumor into certainty, turn a story into a verdict, and make cruelty feel like righteousness when it’s aimed at the designated villain.
Context matters: Alger is writing in the long 19th-century shadow of revolutions, revival meetings, reform crusades, and newspaper-fueled moral panics - a period when public feeling could mobilize abolitionist courage one day and nativist violence the next. His sentence carries the era’s anxiety about mass politics and mass media before those terms existed.
The subtext is personal, almost private: don’t confuse being swept up with being persuaded. Keep your sympathy, Alger implies, but refuse to let it do your thinking for you.
“Sympathy” is the trapdoor word. Alger isn’t condemning compassion as such; he’s condemning compassion when it’s unaccountable. Sympathy feels ethical, even noble, so it gives mass opinion a self-justifying glow. In a crowd, caring becomes a credential: if you’re moved, you’re “right.” That’s how sentiment can launder rumor into certainty, turn a story into a verdict, and make cruelty feel like righteousness when it’s aimed at the designated villain.
Context matters: Alger is writing in the long 19th-century shadow of revolutions, revival meetings, reform crusades, and newspaper-fueled moral panics - a period when public feeling could mobilize abolitionist courage one day and nativist violence the next. His sentence carries the era’s anxiety about mass politics and mass media before those terms existed.
The subtext is personal, almost private: don’t confuse being swept up with being persuaded. Keep your sympathy, Alger implies, but refuse to let it do your thinking for you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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