Quotes from Eric Hoffer

with a fading of the individual's creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here 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.

People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication.

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.1

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure.

Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have.

needs the iron will, daring and vision of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement.

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated1 predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Now and then I am inclined to think that the passion to teach, which is far more powerful and primitive than the passion to learn, is a a factor in the rise of mass movements. For what do we see in the Communist world? Half of the globe has been turned into a vast schoolroom with a thousand million pupils at the mercy of a band of maniacal schoolmasters.

The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation's future.

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

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow - by the tilt of the social landscape.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion; it is an evil government.

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

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

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.