Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.”

— Eric Hoffer

452. “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.12 No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They.”

— Eric Hoffer

453. “The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”

— Eric Hoffer

454. “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

455. “There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.”

— Eric Hoffer

456. “Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.”

— Eric Hoffer

457. “Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.”

— Eric Hoffer

458. “Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.”

— Eric Hoffer

459. “It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.”

— Eric Hoffer

460. “Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.”

— Eric Hoffer

461. “It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.”

— Eric Hoffer

462. “The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

464. “What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.”

— Eric Hoffer

465. “When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.”

— Eric Hoffer

Featured in: Strong Quotes

466. “To the old, the new is usually bad news.”

— Eric Hoffer

467. “My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.”

— Eric Hoffer

468. “Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

470. “All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium.”

— Eric Hoffer

471. “One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action – the ability to pass directly from thought to action.”

— Eric Hoffer

472. “Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.”

— Eric Hoffer

473. “A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.”

— Eric Hoffer

474. “A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.”

— Eric Hoffer

475. “The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2.”

— Eric Hoffer

476. “One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer

477. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

478. “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

479. “However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”

— Eric Hoffer

480. “All prayers and hopes are a reaching-out for coincidences.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

482. “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

483. “How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.”

— Eric Hoffer

484. “We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.”

— Eric Hoffer

485. “On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times.”

— Eric Hoffer

486. “An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future. It is from this attitude that it derives its strength, for it can proceed recklessly with the present – with the health, wealth and lives of its followers.”

— Eric Hoffer

487. “Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.”

— Eric Hoffer

488. “To lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.”

— Eric Hoffer

489. “Animals often strike us as passionate machines.”

— Eric Hoffer

490. “More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.”

— Eric Hoffer

491. “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

492. “The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.”

— Eric Hoffer

493. “The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.”

— Eric Hoffer

494. “Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.”

— Eric Hoffer

495. “Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.”

— Eric Hoffer

496. “Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.”

— Eric Hoffer

497. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

498. “One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure.”

— Eric Hoffer

499. “Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer