|
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Source: None
|
Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Source: None
|
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of a mass movement unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication is the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, "it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.".
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
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.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.
Author: Eric Hoffer
Source: None
|
Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off.
Author: Stewart H. Holbrook
Source: None
|
I think I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.
Author: E.w. Howe
Source: None
|
Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.
Author: Arthur Koestler
Source: None
|
The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
Author: Arthur Koestler
Source: None
|
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
Author: B.h. Liddell Hart
Source: None
|
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
Author: Lin Yutang
Source: None
|
Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
Author: W. Somerset Maugham
Source: None
|
...far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
Author: Richard Mitchell
Source: None
|
When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and events, its always useful to ask, who profits?
Author: Richard Mitchell
Source: None
|
He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
Author: Charles Peguy
Source: None
|
Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so science is made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
Author: Henri Poincare
Source: None
|
Mere facts are for children only. As they begin to point towards conclusions they become food for men.
Author: Edmund Selous
Source: None
|
Destiny is an invention of the cowardly and the resigned.
Author: Ignazio Silone
Source: None
|
All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.
Author: Julian Simon
Source: None
|
Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Author: Thomas Sowell
Source: None
|
