Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death.”

— Eric Hoffer

452. “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

453. “It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

455. “There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people – we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.”

— Eric Hoffer

456. “A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

458. “It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”

— Eric Hoffer

459. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

461. “The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

472. “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

473. “The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.”

— Eric Hoffer

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “The individual’s most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.”

— Eric Hoffer

478. “If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

— Eric Hoffer

479. “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

480. “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

481. “It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

483. “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

484. “Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.”

— Eric Hoffer

485. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

489. “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

490. “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

491. “It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.”

— Eric Hoffer

492. “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

493. “There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.”

— Eric Hoffer

494. “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

495. “Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthropy of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

497. “The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— 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. “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