Hoffer Quotes

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

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.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

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

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

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

Anger is the prelude to courage.

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.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

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

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

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

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.

To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

We feel free when we escape, even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

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

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

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.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.

Things which are not" are indeed mightier than "things that are". In all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted.

The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man’s spirit than when we win his heart. —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.

Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.

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

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

خلافنا مع العالم صدى للخلاف المستمر بداخلنا.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day; we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.

Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.

The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.

كلما استحال على الإنسان أن يدعي التفوق لنفسه، كلما سهل عليه يدّعي التفوق لأمته، أو لدينه أو لعرقه، أو لقضيته المقدسة.

عندما يثور الناس في مجتمع ديكتاتوري، فإنهم لا يثورون على ظلم النظام، بل على ضعفه

We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sun, the stars and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

إن الذين لا يجدون صعوبة فى خداع انفسهم لا يجدون صعوبة فى خداع الاخرين لهم، ومن ثم فمن السهل اقناعهم وقيادتهم

يعاني أتباع الأديان السامية شعورا بالذنب عندما تتسع الهوة بين تعاليم دينهم وواقعهم المليء بالمعاصي، وعندما يدخل التطرف الصورة فإن الشعور بالذنب يتحول إلى كراهية سافرة، وهكذا نجد كل ما ازداد التطرف عند أتباع مذهب ما - مهما كان هذا المذهب ساميا - كلما نما لديهم شعورا بالكراهية

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

The enemy—the indispensible devil of every mass movement—is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful. It is his voice that speaks through the mouth of the dissenter, and the deviationists are his stooges. If anything goes wrong within the movement, it is his doing. It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat. 2.10.

The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.

The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.

Passionate hatreds can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. These people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

لا شيء يعزّز ثقتنا بالنفس ويساعدنا على العيش معها كالقدرة المستمرة على الإبداع: أن نرى الأشياء تنمو وتكبر بين أيدينا يوماً بعد يوم. وليس من المستبعد أن يكون اختفاء الحرف اليدوية في الأوقات المعاصرة سبباً في تزايد الإحباط وفي انجذاب الفرد إلى الحركات الجماهيرية.

An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.

IN THE MID-1950S, Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, learned about Osmond and Hoffer’s work with alcoholics. The idea that a drug could occasion a life-changing spiritual experience was not exactly news to Bill W., as he was known in the fellowship. He credited his own sobriety to a mystical experience he had on belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties that was administered to him at Towns Hospital in Manhattan in 1934. Few members of AA realize that the whole idea of a spiritual awakening leading one to surrender to a “higher power”—a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous—can be traced to a psychedelic drug trip.

When this happens, as it is today, then, to quote Eric Hoffer, “When freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom.” At that point the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two roads to the same end. There is no difference between authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, an authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it - from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assure the functioning of some political system, business, and the affairs of daily life. That is just what Rome did with Caesar Augustus

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. 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.

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

We acquire a sense of worth either by realizing our talents, or by keeping busy, or by identifying ourselves with something apart from us--be it a cause, a leader, a group, possessions and the like. Of the three, the path of self-realization is the most difficult. It is taken only when other avenues to a sense of worth are more or less blocked. Men of talent have to be encouraged and goaded to engage in creative work. Their groans and laments echo through the ages. Action is a highroad to self-confidence and esteem.

والملل هو الذي فسر لنا ظواهر أخرى: كثرة العوانس والسيدات اللواتي تجاوزن منتصف العمر في بدايات الحركات الجماهيرية. حتى عندما نكون بصدد حركة لا ترحب بعمل المرأة خارج المنزل ، كانازية مثلا ، نجد نساء يؤدين دورا كبيرا في نشأة الحركة. هناك شبه من نوع ما ، بين إنضمام المرأة إلى زوج وإنضمامها إلى حركة جماهيرية ففي كلتا الحالتين هنالك هدف جديد وهوية جديدة -اسم جديد-. إن الملل الذي تشعر به العوانس والنساء اللواتي لم يعد بوسعهن العثور على السعادة والرضا في زواج ناتج أساسا عن ضيقهن بحياة عقيمة فاشلة. وعندما يعتنق هؤلاء النسوة قضية مقدسة يسخرنلها وجودهن كله وطاقتهم كلها ، فإنهن يجدن حياة جديدة مليئة بالمعنى والهدف!!! ص100