Eric Hoffer Quotes

396 Sourced Quotes

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

Eric Hoffer
Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

Eric Hoffer
There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

Eric Hoffer
If in order to keep the wheels turning you have to deafen ears with propaganda, crack the whip of Terror, and keep pushing people around, then you haven't got a machine civilization no matter how numerous and ingenious your machines.

Eric Hoffer
Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

Eric Hoffer
I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights.

Eric Hoffer
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
Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, where Faith obtains its more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.

Eric Hoffer
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

Eric Hoffer
Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.

Eric Hoffer
Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

Eric Hoffer
Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own... Whether it our own meaningless self we are upholding, or some doctrine devoid of evidence, we can do it only in a frenzy of faith.

Eric Hoffer
The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.

Eric Hoffer
Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking — what we call marching — is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience.

Eric Hoffer
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.

Eric Hoffer
It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise.

Eric Hoffer
To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.

Eric Hoffer
There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

Eric Hoffer
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.

Eric Hoffer
However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

Eric Hoffer
The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. According to Renan, "The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men."

Eric Hoffer
Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.

Eric Hoffer
To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.

Eric Hoffer
It is a strange thing that both the injurer and the injured, the sinner and he who is sinned against, should find in the mass movement an escape from a blemished life.

Eric Hoffer
It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.

Eric Hoffer
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
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

Eric Hoffer
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.

Eric Hoffer
Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

Eric Hoffer
The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.

Eric Hoffer