Eric Hoffer

For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power — a slogan, a word, a button.

To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.

the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist — slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within — drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes. Perhaps the sexually impotent are subject to the same impulse. (The

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. [...] 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.

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

We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

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.

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.

The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

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.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?