Eric Hoffer Quotes About Society

Quotes about: Society

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

  Eric Hoffer

  Clever, Fear, Halloween

  Eric Hoffer (1955). “The passionate state of mind, and other aphorisms”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Running, Fall, Men

  Eric Hoffer (2011). “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”, p.14, Harper Collins

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

  Eric Hoffer

  Society, Quality, Improvement

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.

  Eric Hoffer

  Attitude, Taken, Home

• To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.

  Eric Hoffer

  Education, Truth, Ignorance

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Powerful, Hatred, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Letting Go, Ideas, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Opposites, Together, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

• Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

  Eric Hoffer

  Animal, Men, Play

  "Reflections on the Human Condition". Book by Eric Hoffer. Section 28, 1973.

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

  Eric Hoffer

  People, Society, Technique

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

  Eric Hoffer

  Men, Noble Man, Atrocities Committed

• A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

  Eric Hoffer

  Self, Anxiety, Abuse

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• It is not at all simple to understand the simple.

  Eric Hoffer

  Simple, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

• The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.

  Eric Hoffer

  Real, People, Rejection

  Eric Hoffer (1996). “The Passionate State of Mind”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Society, Desire, World

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

  Eric Hoffer

  Opposites, Society, Way

  Eric Hoffer (1963). “The Ordeal of Change”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Sacrifice, Self, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Society, Deceiving, Deceived

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients.

  Eric Hoffer

  Believe, People, Mind

  "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements". Book by Eric Hoffer, 1951.

• We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.

  Eric Hoffer

  Military, Moving, Fighting

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Eric Hoffer

  Fighting, Men, Society

  ERIC HOFFER (1963). “THE TRUE BELIEVER”

• We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

  Eric Hoffer

  Running, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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

  Eric Hoffer

  Spiritual, Men, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.

  Eric Hoffer

  Society, Privilege, Reputation

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

• 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.

  Eric Hoffer

  Frustration, Self, Society

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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