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“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 75
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

“It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

Section 56
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Context: It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
Context: The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life.... For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act.... All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.... by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it.... To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.

“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.”

“What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.”

Section 89
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.”

Source: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.”

“We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.”

“There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.”

“Flaubert and Nietzsche have emphasized the importance of standing up and walking in the process of thinking. The peripatetics were perhaps motivated by the same awareness. Yet purposeful walking — what we call marching — is an enemy of thought and is used as a powerful instrument for the suppression of independent thought and the inculcation of unquestioned obedience.”

Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together.”

Entry (1962)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance — of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.”

Entry (1956)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.”

Section 6
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“To think for oneself is not only, as Gide said, counterrevolutionary but also apostasy and, at certain times, treason.”

Entry (1953)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities. Disorder does not come from an increased inner pressure or from the interaction of explosive ingredients. There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is now greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and ability of the majority to react.
It is hard to tell what causes the pervasive timidity. One thinks of video-induced stupor, intake of tranquilizers, fear of not living to enjoy the many new possessions and toys, the example of our betters in cities and on campuses who high-mindedly surrender to threats of violence and make cowardice fashionable.”

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

“It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves — not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self.”

Entry (1956)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”

Source: Reflections on the Human Condition (1973) Section 53

“Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.”

Entry (1967)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 100
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 9
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements

“Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.”

Section 44
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)