Eric Hoffer Quotes
The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
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.
The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.
It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
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 life
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow - by the tilt of the social landscape.
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
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.
Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
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.
Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.
There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.
Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.
The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.
What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.
It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
