Eric Hoffer Quotes

471 quotes in 4535 categories

• To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens…
• I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into…
• Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is…
• The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing…
• Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
• Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own…
• Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.
• In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final…
• The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
• When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture,…
• The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
• The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes…
• Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most…
• Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
• Intolerance is the ''Do Not Touch'' sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not…
• The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a…
• A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
• We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something…
• Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
• It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the…

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