Eric Hoffer Quotes (210 Quotes)

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

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

When you automate an industry you modernize it when you automate a life you primitivize it.

The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. 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.

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

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.

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

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.

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

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals as by turning him into a machine. Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human. 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. It is also obvious that when man domesticated animals and plants he acquired self-made machines for the production of food, power, and beauty.

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

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

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

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

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

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

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

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

Successful action tends to become an end in itself.

The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

To believe that is we could but have this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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

Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

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.

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

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

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom - freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.