Eric Hoffer Quotes

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

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.

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.

All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.

Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

A person's creative ability decreases in direct proportion to the degree to which he takes himself seriously.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

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.

First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.

Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity--the endless flow of life and death--than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.

It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.

In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.

A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.

Anger is a prelude to courage.

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

Language was invented to ask questions.

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.

Nature attains perfection, but man never does.