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Mistakes
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People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
-Eric Hoffer
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Modern, Modernism
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When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
-Eric Hoffer
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Money
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A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.
-Eric Hoffer
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Music
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It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.
-Eric Hoffer
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
-Eric Hoffer
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Nature
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Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.
-Eric Hoffer
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Necessity
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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
-Eric Hoffer
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Neighbors
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It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
-Eric Hoffer
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Obscurity
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More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
-Eric Hoffer
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Opportunity
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It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
-Eric Hoffer
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It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.
-Eric Hoffer
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Passion
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There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
-Eric Hoffer
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The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
-Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954
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Persuasion
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The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.
-Eric Hoffer
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Play/Games
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It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
-Eric Hoffer
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Power
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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy weakness wherever they see it.
-Eric Hoffer
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Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
-Eric Hoffer
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To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
-Eric Hoffer
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Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's heart one day and lose it the next. But when we break a proud spirit we achieve something that is final and absolute.
-Eric Hoffer
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Prejudice
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That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.
-Eric Hoffer
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We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
-Eric Hoffer
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When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
-Eric Hoffer
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Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.
-Eric Hoffer
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Propaganda
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Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
-Eric Hoffer
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Prophecy
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The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
-Eric Hoffer
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Books by and about Eric Hoffer