Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts…
• We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
• All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they…
• Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your…
• Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future... We watch our experts read the entrails of…
• To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man…
• Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new…
• Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's…
• 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.…
• Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough…
• The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless…
• Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
• Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
• Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
• The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money.…
• A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness…
• The untalented are more at ease in a society that gives them valid alibis for not achieving than in one where opportunities are abundant. In…
• In man's life, the absence of an essential component usually leads to the adoption of a substitute. The substitute is usually embraced with vehemence and…
• No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
• The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin,…

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