Eric Hoffer Quotes on Society & Civilization (6 Quotes)

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow - by the tilt of the social landscapes.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations past and present are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.