Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.

So disasters come not singly;
But as if they watched and waited,
Scanning one another’s motions,
When the first descends, the others
Follow, follow, gathering flock-wise
Round their victim, sick and wounded,
First a shadow, then a sorrow,
Till the air is dark with anguish.

Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Owing to the combinations of sequences of sounds, there arose simultaneously in the presence of beings different sorts of impulses evoking various contradictory sensations, which in their turn gave rise to unusual experiencings and reflex movements not proper to them.

when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent reason, or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

These things happen. One day you run everything, and the next day
you run like a dog.

Trojans and Achaians, who like wolves sprang upon one another, with man against man in the onfall.

Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.

It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

It might have been a problem if they’d all attacked at once, coming from different directions. She would have taken them all out, but it would have required more ammunition and probably made more noise. It’s always easier just to take out the leader. If there is nothing else to learn from history, it’s that from humans to animals, from the most primitive to the most civilized, most individuals want to be led. Take out the leader, and the rest of the pack panics.

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"