Eric Hoffer Quotes

Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us

It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.

I could never figure out — or probably did not take the trouble to figure out — what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power

Thinking with me is like looking for a person whose address I don't know. I stand on a street corner all day long waiting for him to pass by. Certainly there are more efficient ways of locating a person whose address you don't know. But if you have a whole lifetime to wait and enjoy watching things go by, then waiting on street corners is as good a method as any. If you don't find the person you are looking for, you might meet someone else.

Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

والمتطرف على استعداد للتضحية بحياته لكي يثبت لنفسه، وللآخرين، أن هذا بالفعل هو دوره، أن يضحي بحياته؛ ليثبت أهميته!

An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future. It is from this attitude that it derives its strength, for it can proceed recklessly with the present — with the health, wealth and lives of its followers.

The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature;

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.