Eric Hoffer: Trending quotes

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Eric Hoffer: 480 quotes14 likes

“There are, of course, rare leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi… They do not hesitate to harness man's hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause; but… they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as the mortar in the building of a new world… for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 113, Ch. 17 The Practical Men of Action
The True Believer (1951), Part Four: Beginning and End

“We take for granted the need to escape the self. Yet the self can also be a refuge. In totalitarian countries the great hunger is for private life. Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity.”

Section 55
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 8
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements

“Once the stage is set, the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable. Without him there will be no movement.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

“It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.”

Section 33
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“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.”

Source: Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), p. 62

“We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 69
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

“Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.”

Israel's Peculiar Position (1968)

“Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.”

Section 184
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“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. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 5, Ch. 2: The Desire For Substitutes
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements

“To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”

Section 151, p. 93
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.”

Source: First Things, Last Things (1971), Ch. 8 "Thoughts on the Present"

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

From The Passionate State of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955), p. 260 ; as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0231071949, ed. Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press (1993), p. 741 <br class="br">The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“It is not good for our efforts at self-realization to know the opinions other people have of us. It is difficult or perhaps impossible to be ourselves if we are known.”

Entry (1951)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

The True Believer (1951), Part Four: Beginning and End

“Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.”

"The Trend Toward Anarchy," p. 52
In Our Time (1976)

“It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.”

Section 49
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”

Section 123
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“Not only are oppression and exploitation an old story in Asia, but the colonial regimes of the British in lndia and of the Dutch in lndonesia were fairly beneficient—more so perhaps than any regime those countries ever had or are likely to have for some time. I am convinced that were the Western colonial powers a hundred times more beneficent, and had they been animated from very beginning by the purest philantropic motives, their impact on the Orient would still have had the fateful consequences we are witnessing at present.”

Conflict and consensus: readings toward a sociological perspective (1973), p. 438, Harper & Row.

“We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.”

Ch. 1: "Drastic Change" http://books.google.com/books?id=7Y-NoJ8yNIkC&q=%22every+radical+adjustment+is+a+crisis+in+self-esteem%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage <br class="br">The Ordeal of Change (1963)