Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer
Eric Hofferwas an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth25 July 1902
CountryUnited States of America
self miracle corny
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
society strive ends
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
men noble-man atrocities-committed
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.
animal passionate machines
Animals often strike us as passionate machines.
thinking people decay
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
nature ambition tilt
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flowby the tilt of the social landscape.
cutting power simple
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.
powerful men law
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
country environment revolutionary
Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
love hate white
We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.
happiness believe mean
To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.
men bad-company company
A man by himself is in bad company.
facts affair process
The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
leadership work degrees
Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.