Quotes from Eric Hoffer

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

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.

Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.

When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.

The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. It not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance.

We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.

Rudeness is the weak man's limitation of strength.

Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.