Swarm Quotes

What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee. (Marcus Aurelius)
The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants. View quote
Isoroku Yamamoto
Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud. View quote
Romain Gary
Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. (Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.) View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the valley of Panjsher on my lips. I ran. View quote
Khaled Hosseini
Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. View quote
Orson Scott Card
There have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. View quote
Philip Sidney
For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people. View quote
Thomas More
The wand ricocheted through the swarm, thumping six, seven, eight of the little monsters before returning to Carter's hand. "Not bad,” I said. "Keep it up! View quote
Rick Riordan
In order to spare you any further repulsion, it would be best not to mention any of the unpleasant details of this story, particularly a secret message, a toboggan, a deceitful trap, a swarm of snow gnats, a scheming villain, a troupe of organized youngsters, a covered casserole dish, and a surprising survivor of a terrible fire. View quote
Daniel Handler
The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate [a free inquiry]? The blackest billingsgate, most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. (John Adams)
How glad I am to be almost alone as an artist among artists, with the whole swarm of artists somewhere else. View quote
Emil Nolde
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away. View quote
Wallace Stevens
And this is no aristocratic joke At the expense of negligible folk. We see how seriously the races swarm In their attempts at sovereignty and form. They are our wards we think to some extent For the time being and with their consent, To teach them how Democracy is meant. View quote
Robert Frost
Julia's original email says, "We have nothing to lose." But in the end they lost everything - their company, their lives, everything. And the ironic thing is, the procedure worked. The swarm actually solved the problem they had set for it. View quote
Michael Crichton
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons. View quote
Khaled Hosseini
There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. View quote
Emil Cioran
Then our Musalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier in the north to the extreme end of Bengal. View quote
Syed Ahmed Khan
The multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him... [from Macbeth]. View quote
Alan Moore
It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting. View quote
Kevin Kelly (editor)
Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results. (Kevin Kelly (editor))
The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment. View quote
Kevin Kelly (editor)
Complete surrender to the bottom is not what embracing swarm power is about. View quote
Kevin Kelly (editor)
To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
O autumn winds that bake and burn And all the world to darkness turn, Now storm and seize and make of me... A swarm of leaves from Autumn's Tree! View quote
Ray Bradbury