Stampede Quotes
Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
Douglas MacArthur
But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.
By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass group emotions.
Edward Bernays
The stampede toward "rational expectations” - widely thought to be a "revolution,” though it was only a generalization of the neoclassical idea of equilibrium-derailed the expectations-driven model building that had just left the station. In the end, this way of modeling has not illuminated how the world economy works.
Edmund Phelps
