American philosopher
Eric Hoffer (25 July 1902 – 21 May 1983) was an American writer on social and political philosophy. His first book, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements (1951) is widely recognized as a classic on mass-movements and the psychological roots of fanaticism. Despite rising to fame with the success and popularity of his writings, he continued to work as a longshoreman until retiring at age 65.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
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.
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI
Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.
والملل هو الذي فسر لنا ظواهر أخرى:
كثرة العوانس والسيدات اللواتي تجاوزن منتصف العمر في بدايات الحركات الجماهيرية. حتى عندما نكون بصدد حركة لا ترحب بعمل المرأة خارج المنزل ، كانازية مثلا ، نجد نساء يؤدين دورا كبيرا في نشأة الحركة. هناك شبه من نوع ما ،
بين إنضمام المرأة إلى زوج وإنضمامها إلى حركة جماهيرية ففي كلتا الحالتين هنالك هدف جديد وهوية جديدة -اسم جديد-.
إن الملل الذي تشعر به العوانس والنساء اللواتي لم يعد بوسعهن العثور على السعادة والرضا في زواج ناتج أساسا عن ضيقهن بحياة عقيمة فاشلة.
وعندما يعتنق هؤلاء النسوة قضية مقدسة يسخرنلها وجودهن كله وطاقتهم كلها ، فإنهن يجدن حياة جديدة مليئة بالمعنى والهدف!!! ص100
The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.
Nature of the Desire for Change:
There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming — the world.”
It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.