Eric Hoffer Society Quotations

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

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

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

A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.

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

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.

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

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.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.

The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.

Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.

Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.