Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

102. “The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.”

— Eric Hoffer

103. “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”

— Eric Hoffer

104. “There is a time when the word “eventually” has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.”

— Eric Hoffer

105. “It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.”

— Eric Hoffer

106. “The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth.”

— Eric Hoffer

107. “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

108. “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

— Eric Hoffer

109. “When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.”

— Eric Hoffer

110. “Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.”

— Eric Hoffer

111. “The greatest weariness comes from work not done.”

— Eric Hoffer

112. “Some people are born to spend their lives catching up; and they are as a rule the passionate ones.”

— Eric Hoffer

113. “If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.”

— Eric Hoffer

114. “Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one’s religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?”

— Eric Hoffer

115. “We are made kind by being kind.”

— Eric Hoffer

116. “To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.”

— Eric Hoffer

117. “The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.”

— Eric Hoffer

118. “Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.”

— Eric Hoffer

119. “Communists are frustrated capitalists.”

— Eric Hoffer

120. “The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.”

— Eric Hoffer

121. “Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.”

— Eric Hoffer

122. “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

123. “The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.”

— Eric Hoffer

124. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

126. “There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.”

— Eric Hoffer

127. “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

— Eric Hoffer

128. “When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.”

— Eric Hoffer

129. “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest. A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness.”

— Eric Hoffer

130. “To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. It not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance.”

— Eric Hoffer

131. “In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.”

— Eric Hoffer

132. “Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.”

— Eric Hoffer

133. “The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.”

— Eric Hoffer

134. “The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.”

— Eric Hoffer

135. “Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.”

— Eric Hoffer

136. “Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.”

— Eric Hoffer

137. “When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.”

— Eric Hoffer

138. “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.”

— Eric Hoffer

139. “Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.”

— Eric Hoffer

140. “An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”

— Eric Hoffer

141. “Spiritual stagnation ensues when man’s environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.”

— Eric Hoffer

142. “Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.”

— Eric Hoffer

143. “It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.”

— Eric Hoffer

144. “A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.”

— Eric Hoffer

145. “There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.”

— Eric Hoffer

146. “Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.”

— Eric Hoffer

147. “The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

149. “Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.”

— Eric Hoffer

150. “It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.”

— Eric Hoffer