Eric Hoffer Quotes
- We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word…
- Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.
- A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
- When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
- Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in…
- The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
- It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
- The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to…
- It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.
- One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
- The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a…
- Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
- Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who…
- The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in…
- The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
- The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
- To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down…
- The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by…
- The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his…
- Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.