Eric Hoffer Quotes

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility

All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.

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.

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.

The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.

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.

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.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgement, or moral and aesthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free, we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoléon, Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.

Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.

America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.

[The designated or chosen leader tries to] articulate and justify the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action.

Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

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.

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.