Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

114. “Communists are frustrated capitalists.”

— Eric Hoffer

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

119. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

133. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

139. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer

141. “The superficiality of many is a result of deep fears. It takes spare time to think things out; it takes free time to mature. People in a hurry may not think well or mature well. The next best is a state of perpetual puerility.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

143. “When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

144. “To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as a fuel of achievement.”

— Eric Hoffer

145. “The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.”

— Eric Hoffer

146. “I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.”

— Eric Hoffer

147. “Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man’s spirit than when we win his heart.”

— Eric Hoffer

148. “Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

150. “There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.”

— Eric Hoffer