Quotes from Eric Hoffer

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

...That genius is a rare exception (:) It's not true. Talent and genius have been wasted on enormous scale throughout our history; this is all I know for sure.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

Somewhere between the Angels and the French lies the rest of humanity.

There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Creativity is discontent translated into arts.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.

Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.

The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.

Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

All prayers and hopes are a reaching-out for coincidences.

It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.