Eric Hoffer: Likeness

Eric Hoffer was American philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Eric Hoffer: 480   quotes 12   likes

“It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability.”

Eric Hoffer

Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 13: "Scribe, Writer, and Rebel"
Context: It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be more pronounced and explosive. Thus the most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them. For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated. If such an arrangement lacks provisions for the encouragement of the talented it yet has the merit of not interfering with them.

“I like half-truths of a certain kind — they are interesting and they stimulate.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1950)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle," says Bagehot, "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought: it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind — they are interesting and they stimulate.

Truth

“They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 28
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts
Context: Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the "free for all." They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

Freedom , Happiness

“People who are clear-sighted, undeluded, and sober-minded will not go on working once their reasonable needs are satisfied. A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities. The readiness to work springs from trivial, questionable motives.”

Eric Hoffer

Journal entry (22 February1959, 8:15 P.M.)
Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1969)
Context: There is, for instance, the fact that there is a greater readiness to work in a society with a high standard of living than in one with a low standard. We are more ready to strive and work for superfluities than for necessities. People who are clear-sighted, undeluded, and sober-minded will not go on working once their reasonable needs are satisfied. A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities. The readiness to work springs from trivial, questionable motives. … A vigorous society is a society made up of people who set their hearts on toys, and who would work for superfluities than for necessities. The self-righteous moralists decry such a society, yet it is well to keep in mind that both children and artists need luxuries more than they need necessities.

People , Spring , Motivation , Question

“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.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 10
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements

People , Business

“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.”

Eric Hoffer

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

People , World , Thinking , Sense

“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.”

Eric Hoffer

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

Beauty , Behavior , Soul , Thinking

“I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea…. I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick.”

Eric Hoffer

Entry (1959)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Way , Idea , Understanding , Thinking

“By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.”

Eric Hoffer

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

Food , Thinking , Help

“The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worthwhile, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 37, Ch.6 Misfits
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

Hunger , Feeling , Decision , Passion

“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)

Women , Men , Money , Hate

“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

People

“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.

Country , Animals , Time , Motivation

“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)

“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)

“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)

Life , People , Heart

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

Eric Hoffer

Section 83
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Truth , Indifference

“There is in even the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that what we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind the selfless in the exercise of self-sacrifice.”

Eric Hoffer

Source: The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 5: "The Readiness to Work"

Health , Exercises , Passion , Selfishness

“Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there are more efficient ways of locating a person whose address you don't know. But if you have a whole lifetime to wait and enjoy watching things go by, then waiting on street corners is as good a method as any. If you don't find the person you are looking for, you might meet someone else.”

Eric Hoffer

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

Way , Thinking , Waiting , Personality

“One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe — wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land mass a fit habitation for Man. The globe should be our and not nature's home, and we no longer nature's guests.”

Eric Hoffer

The Temper of Our Time (1967)

Home , Mountain , Nature , Effort