Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
• The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.
• A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of…
• A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is…
• A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding,
• Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.
• Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
• Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America,
• I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish,…
• Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
• My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch.…
• However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human…
• Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
• The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human…
• Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards…
• The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into…
• We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But…
• The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its…
• Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
• When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people…

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