Eric Hoffer
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.
It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
To the old, the new is usually bad news.
Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.
A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.
We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.Collection: Rowdy
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.Collection: Spring
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.Collection: Devil
Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.Collection: Want
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 the hands of a maniac.Collection: Fate
All mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ.Collection: Reality
The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.Collection: Learners
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.Collection: Society
When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.Collection: Lying
The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.Collection: Vanity
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.Collection: Fear
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 is an evil government.Collection: Kindness
For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.Collection: Failure
Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.Collection: Inspirational
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own lifeCollection: Passionate
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 and stenches.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: Crush
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 solutions.Collection: Finals
Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.Collection: Inspirational
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 uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.Collection: Life
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 in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.Collection: Sight
Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.Collection: Want
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.Collection: Faith
The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.Collection: Future
A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.Collection: People
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow - by the tilt of the social landscape.Collection: Nature
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.Collection: Humility
What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.Collection: Cease
Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.Collection: Thinking
Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.Collection: Israel
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.Collection: Thinking
Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgement, or moral and aesthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free, we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoléon, Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.Collection: Pride
More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.Collection: Pain
True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.Collection: Loyalty
Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.Collection: Wise
In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern.Collection: Art