« All Society Quotes · Eric Hoffer's Page
Society Quotes by Eric Hoffer
- The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flowby the tilt of the social landscape.
- 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…
- 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 difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its…
- It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the market place and…
- The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human…
- All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
- In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
- In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
- Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in…
- There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it
- 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.
More Society Quotes
- The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls.… — Jean-Bertrand Aristide
- The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. — Aristotle
- Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. — Aristotle
- I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods,… — Paul Auster
- Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been… — J. J. Abrams
- Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants… — Karen Armstrong
- Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are… — Karen Armstrong
- In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand. — Neil Armstrong
- At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at… — Rudolf Arnheim
- The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov
- When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society… — Isaac Asimov
- Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. — Francis of Assisi