Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner…
• The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
• To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.
• It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
• The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
• There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished...Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and…
• The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment damned up in the…
• It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
• 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…
• 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…
• Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.
• The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The…
• It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
• 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…
• A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
• The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a…
• There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and…
• There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.
• Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
• There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those…

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