Top 100 Eric Hoffer Quotes
#1. The words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.
Christopher McDougall
#2. Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.' Eric Hoffer
Minette Walters
#3. Eric Hoffer, studied the reasons why people voluntarily give away responsibility and join mass movements and mobs. One quote he collected came from a young German who explained that he joined the Nazi party to be "free from freedom.
Eric Greitens
#4. We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling. - Eric Hoffer
David Allen
#5. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. - Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
Philip G. Zimbardo
#6. A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.
Eric Hoffer
#7. Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion , a truth , a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.
Eric Hoffer
#8. In modern times, nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm, and that nationalist fervor must be tapped if the drastic changes projected and initiated by revolutionary enthusiasm are to be consummated.
Eric Hoffer
#11. The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Eric Hoffer
#12. Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America
Eric Hoffer
#13. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.
Eric Hoffer
#14. When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.
Eric Hoffer
#15. The superficiality of many is a result of deep fears. It takes spare time to think things out; it takes free time to mature. People in a hurry may not think well or mature well. The next best is a state of perpetual puerility.
Eric Hoffer
#16. It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
Eric Hoffer
#17. Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
Eric Hoffer
#18. Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
Eric Hoffer
#19. Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.
Eric Hoffer
#20. Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
Eric Hoffer
#21. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
Eric Hoffer
#22. Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.
Eric Hoffer
#23. Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
Eric Hoffer
#24. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
Eric Hoffer
#25. In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
#26. It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.
Eric Hoffer
#27. The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
Eric Hoffer
#28. To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes
we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
Eric Hoffer
#29. The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.
Eric Hoffer
#30. The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.
Eric Hoffer
#31. Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
Eric Hoffer
#32. When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer
#33. In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.
Eric Hoffer
#34. Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
Eric Hoffer
#35. It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.
Eric Hoffer
#36. There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.
Eric Hoffer
#37. Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthropy of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire.
Eric Hoffer
#38. What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.
Eric Hoffer
#39. There is a time when the word "eventually" has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.
Eric Hoffer
#40. There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action.
Eric Hoffer
#41. When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.
Eric Hoffer
#42. People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Eric Hoffer
#43. It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.
Eric Hoffer
#44. Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
Eric Hoffer
#45. Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity.
Eric Hoffer
#46. The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
Eric Hoffer
#47. A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.
Eric Hoffer
#48. We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.
Eric Hoffer
#49. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
Eric Hoffer
#50. Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
Eric Hoffer
#51. Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
Eric Hoffer
#52. We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
Eric Hoffer
#53. Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
#54. That genius is a rare exception ( It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.
Eric Hoffer
#55. The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.
Eric Hoffer
#56. If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
Eric Hoffer
#57. What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.
Eric Hoffer
#58. Things which are not" are indeed mightier than "things that are". In all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted.
Eric Hoffer
#59. Though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.
Eric Hoffer
#60. The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.
Eric Hoffer
#61. With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
Eric Hoffer
#62. Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
Eric Hoffer
#63. One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure
Eric Hoffer
#64. Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.
Eric Hoffer
#65. The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.
Eric Hoffer
#66. To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer
#67. Somewhere between the Angels and the French lies the rest of humanity.
Eric Hoffer
#68. The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer
#69. When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.
Eric Hoffer
#70. Nature attains perfection, but man never does.
Eric Hoffer
#71. To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy, or to pursue any excessive desire, diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.
Eric Hoffer
#72. A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.
Eric Hoffer
#73. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion; it is an evil government.
Eric Hoffer
#74. Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Eric Hoffer
#75. Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
Eric Hoffer
#76. Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success
Eric Hoffer
#77. For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.
Eric Hoffer
#78. To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
Eric Hoffer
#79. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
Eric Hoffer
#80. We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
#81. We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.
Eric Hoffer
#82. The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.
Eric Hoffer
#83. To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as a fuel of achievement.
Eric Hoffer
#84. The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.
Eric Hoffer
#85. We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.
Eric Hoffer
#86. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer
#87. When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer
#88. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.
Eric Hoffer
#89. In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer
#90. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.
Eric Hoffer
#91. The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
Eric Hoffer
#92. The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer
#93. The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer
#94. The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.
Eric Hoffer
#95. There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.
Eric Hoffer
#96. There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Eric Hoffer
#97. Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.
Eric Hoffer
#98. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
Eric Hoffer
#99. To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
Eric Hoffer
#100. To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him
Eric Hoffer
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