Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.”

— Eric Hoffer

202. “The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.”

— Eric Hoffer

203. “An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity – the endless flow of life and death – than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.”

— Eric Hoffer

204. “It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.”

— Eric Hoffer

205. “With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

206. “It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.”

— Eric Hoffer

207. “People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”

— Eric Hoffer

208. “Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.”

— Eric Hoffer

209. “Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”

— Eric Hoffer

210. “You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others – that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.”

— Eric Hoffer

211. “Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.”

— Eric Hoffer

212. “It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.”

— Eric Hoffer

213. “It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise.”

— Eric Hoffer

214. “The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.”

— Eric Hoffer

215. “Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.”

— Eric Hoffer

216. “We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.”

— Eric Hoffer

217. “The necessary has never been man’s top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man’s greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.”

— Eric Hoffer

218. “We cannot hate those who we despise.”

— Eric Hoffer

219. “The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.”

— Eric Hoffer

220. “Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing.”

— Eric Hoffer

221. “The most incurably frustrated – and, therefore, the most vehement – among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth-while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion.”

— Eric Hoffer

222. “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.”

— Eric Hoffer

223. “The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.”

— Eric Hoffer

224. “I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.”

— Eric Hoffer

225. “It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.”

— Eric Hoffer

226. “There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.”

— Eric Hoffer

227. “It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.”

— Eric Hoffer

228. “It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.”

— Eric Hoffer

229. “Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.”

— Eric Hoffer

230. “Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.”

— Eric Hoffer

231. “One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.”

— Eric Hoffer

232. “It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.”

— Eric Hoffer

233. “Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.”

— Eric Hoffer

234. “It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.”

— Eric Hoffer

235. “Nature attains perfection, but man never does.”

— Eric Hoffer

236. “The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.”

— Eric Hoffer

237. “There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.”

— Eric Hoffer

238. “Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.”

— Eric Hoffer

239. “Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.”

— Eric Hoffer

240. “Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were “the people,” and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.”

— Eric Hoffer

241. “There is a radicalism in all getting, and a conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative.”

— Eric Hoffer

242. “The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.”

— Eric Hoffer

243. “Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.”

— Eric Hoffer

244. “The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.”

— Eric Hoffer

245. “No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.”

— Eric Hoffer

246. “We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us.”

— Eric Hoffer

247. “The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.”

— Eric Hoffer

248. “There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members.”

— Eric Hoffer

249. “The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.”

— Eric Hoffer

250. “How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!”

— Eric Hoffer