Eric Hoffer

The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.

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.

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.

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

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

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.

Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

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

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

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

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.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

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

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

Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

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

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

America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.

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.

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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