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Eric Hoffer Quotes
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Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer , was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. July 1898 – 21. May 1983
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Eric Hoffer: 240 quotes14 likes

Eric Hoffer Quotes

“Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 36
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time — not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1952)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 13
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing — as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1950)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.”

Eric Hoffer

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

“There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.”

Eric Hoffer

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

“For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Preface
The True Believer (1951)

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 65, Ch.14 Unifying Agents
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

“God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: "I am what I am." Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: "I am what I am not."”

Eric Hoffer

Section 54
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 220
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.”

Eric Hoffer

"Money" p. 37
In Our Time (1976)

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.”

Eric Hoffer

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

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

Eric Hoffer

Section 225
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 21, Ch.5 The Poor
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

“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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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

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

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

"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.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 49
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

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

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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.”

Eric Hoffer

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

“Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 37
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1955)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 163
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

“To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 126
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.”

Eric Hoffer

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

“Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1957)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The beginning of thought is in disagreement — not only with others but also with ourselves.”

Eric Hoffer

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

“It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In maintaining ourselves against all comers, we are maintaining something that is unknown, uncertain, and never wholly provable. We need a chorus of consent, and we are engaged in an unceasing proselytizing campaign in our own behalf.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals… You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.”

Eric Hoffer

Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1HqWUMxbs#t=2m23s with Eric Sevareid (1967)

“Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1950)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 280 http://books.google.com/books?id=msOwAAAAIAAJ&amp;q=%22The+search+for+happiness+is+one+of+the+chief+sources+of+unhappiness%22&amp;pg=PA151#v=onepage <br class="br">The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 115
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 68
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.”

Eric Hoffer

Section 211
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)