Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— 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. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

462. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

464. “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

465. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

467. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

469. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

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. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

490. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

493. “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

494. “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

495. “It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

500. “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