Best 524 quotes of Eric Hoffer on MyQuotes

Eric Hoffer

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    Eric Hoffer

    Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

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    Eric Hoffer

    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 his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

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    Eric Hoffer

    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 to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.

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    Eric Hoffer

    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.

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    Eric Hoffer

    All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

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    Eric Hoffer

    All prayers and hopes are a reaching-out for coincidences.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A man by himself is in bad company.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

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    Eric Hoffer

    America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

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    Eric Hoffer

    An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity--the endless flow of life and death--than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A person's creative ability decreases in direct proportion to the degree to which he takes himself seriously.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

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    Eric Hoffer

    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 and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.

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    Eric Hoffer

    A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

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    Eric Hoffer

    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 voluntary surrender. In both cases, the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is - automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.

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    Eric Hoffer

    By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

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    Eric Hoffer

    By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Children are the keys of paradise.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

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    Eric Hoffer

    Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society .