Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

Quotes

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

• He who has nothing and wants something is less frustrated than he who has something and wants more.

• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

• In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.

• Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

• Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

• It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.

• We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

• It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. but business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.

• There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

• There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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

• Our great weariness comes from work not done.

• When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

• You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

• Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

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

• A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

• The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.