Eric Hoffer Quotes

We cannot hate those who we despise.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

Language was invented to ask questions.

The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

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

We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.

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.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

There can be no freedom without freedom to fail.

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.

True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.

We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then form new combinations.

Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest.

Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.

The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.

To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.

Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.

The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.

Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

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

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

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

Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.

The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.

The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.

To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy, or to pursue any excessive desire, diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.

We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.