Eric Hoffer Quotes

396 Sourced Quotes

Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.

Eric Hoffer
Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.

Eric Hoffer
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.

Eric Hoffer
The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

Eric Hoffer
The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.
Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.

Eric Hoffer
The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

Eric Hoffer
By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.

Eric Hoffer
Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

Eric Hoffer
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.

Eric Hoffer
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

Eric Hoffer
It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.

Eric Hoffer
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts.

Eric Hoffer
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.

Eric Hoffer
What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherent, lucid whole begins to take shape.

Eric Hoffer
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.

Eric Hoffer
When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.

Eric Hoffer
I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea.... I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick.

Eric Hoffer
Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.

Eric Hoffer
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

Eric Hoffer
That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

Eric Hoffer
The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual's identification with a group.

Eric Hoffer
We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.

Eric Hoffer
Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.

Eric Hoffer
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.

Eric Hoffer
In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe's craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe's wrath and scorn.

Eric Hoffer