Home > Topic > the crowds
21 " After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary. All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety. "
― CrimethInc. , Contradictionary
22 " Churchill kept perspective on the crowds that gathered to hear him speak by conceding they would be twice as big if gathered to see him hanged. "
― Winston S. Churchill
23 " They kissed in the middle of the sidewalk, letting the crowds of people flow around them like water around an island. "
― Lawren Leo , Love's Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths
24 " If you are not awed in the presence of a Holy God, then I say you may be like the crowds we have been observing in the Gospel of Mark and think of Jesus as no more than a winning lottery ticket to solve your immediate problems. Once the ticket is cashed, you take the money and go your own way. "
25 " ? If you are not awed in the presence of a Holy God, then I say you may be like the crowds we have been observing in the Gospel of Mark and think of Jesus as no more than a winning lottery ticket to solve your immediate problems. Once the ticket is cashed, you take the money and go your own way. "
26 " Be a provocateur! Provoke people to think! Provoke sleepers to awake! Provoke slaves to revolt against their masters! Provoke everyone to gain control over their fates unchecked! Provoke the lonely to participate the crowds and provoke the crowds to visit the loneliness! Be a provocateur! Provoke people to cross the bridges so that they can see the other side! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan
27 " Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain. "
― Lucy Foley , The Invitation
28 " Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this.If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. "
― Herman Melville , Moby-Dick or, the Whale
29 " I missed the crowds in those big stadiums, the flashbulbs, the roaring cheers - the majesty of the whole thing. I missed it bitterly. So did my father. We shared a thirst to return; unspoken, undeniable. "
― Mitch Albom , For One More Day
30 " Lately I find myself staring at people’s faces... I find myself frantically searching through the crowds for one face. I don’t find that face "
31 " People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice! "
32 " ... a man could build whatever monuments he wanted in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, and business, but if they come at the expense of his children, then he has failed. Once the attention fades and the crowds stop cheering his name and his accomplishments are little more than fine print in a history book, the only thing that truly survives him is his child. That is his legacy. That is what defines him. All else is but a footnote. "
― Steve Pemberton , A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home
33 " I live in the crowds of jollity not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself. "
34 " Every inch of space was used. As the road narrowed, signs receded upwards and changed to the vertical. Businesses simply soared from ground level and hung out vaster, more fascinatingly illuminated shingles than competitors. We were still in a traffic tangle, but now the road curved. Shops crowded the pavements and became homelier. Vegetables, spices, grocery produce in boxes or hanging from shop lintels, meats adangle - as always, my ultimate ghastliness - and here and there among the crowds the alarming spectacle of an armed Sikh, shotgun aslant, casually sitting at a bank entrance. And markets everywhere. To the right, cramped streets sloped down to the harbor. To the left, as we meandered along the tramlines through sudden dense markets of hawkers' barrows, the streets turned abruptly into flights of steps careering upwards into a bluish mist of domestic smoke, clouds of washing on poles, and climbing. Hong Kong had the knack of building where others wouldn't dare. "
― Jonathan Gash , Jade Woman (Lovejoy, #12)
35 " I love the crowds at festivals because they're so chilled out. "
36 " I didn't know what to expect when we first started touring behind 'Southeastern' because you don't want to lull anybody to sleep or lose their attention. But it's really been incredible how the crowds seem to be just as excited for the slow, sad songs as they are for the old rockers. "
37 " The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0 - the wisdom of the crowds - and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined. "
38 " Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. "
39 " As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home. "