Top 500 Eric Hoffer Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.”

— Eric Hoffer

402. “Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.”

— Eric Hoffer

403. “Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people’s assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.”

— Eric Hoffer

404. “We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything which has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate.”

— Eric Hoffer

405. “Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.”

— Eric Hoffer

406. “People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

— Eric Hoffer

407. “The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.”

— Eric Hoffer

408. “Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.”

— Eric Hoffer

409. “A man’s soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.”

— Eric Hoffer

410. “The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.”

— Eric Hoffer

411. “The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.”

— Eric Hoffer

412. “It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”

— Eric Hoffer

413. “Words have ruined more souls than any devil’s agency.”

— Eric Hoffer

414. “A low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.”

— Eric Hoffer

415. “We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

417. “The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.”

— Eric Hoffer

418. “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

419. “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

420. “Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.”

— Eric Hoffer

421. “A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.”

— Eric Hoffer

422. “To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.”

— Eric Hoffer

423. “One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses. He has managed to thrive in social orders dominated by kings, nobles, priests, and merchants, but not in societies suffused with the tastes and values of the masses.”

— Eric Hoffer

424. “The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.”

— Eric Hoffer

425. “Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.”

— Eric Hoffer

426. “You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone.”

— Eric Hoffer

427. “We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.”

— Eric Hoffer

428. “A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.”

— Eric Hoffer

429. “Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.”

— Eric Hoffer

430. “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

431. “There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it.”

— Eric Hoffer

432. “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

433. “The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.”

— Eric Hoffer

434. “Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.”

— Eric Hoffer

435. “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”

— Eric Hoffer

436. “Faith is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal.”

— Eric Hoffer

437. “They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.”

— Eric Hoffer

438. “By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.”

— Eric Hoffer

439. “Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience – the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or “of those who are to be.” We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.”

— Eric Hoffer

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

— Eric Hoffer

441. “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

442. “An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.”

— Eric Hoffer

443. “The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.”

— Eric Hoffer

444. “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

445. “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

446. “Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.”

— Eric Hoffer

447. “Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.”

— Eric Hoffer

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Eric Hoffer