Eric Hoffer Quotes

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.

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every t...

Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.

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

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

It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

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

Children are the keys of paradise.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating...

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

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

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true they ruin our dreams.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

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

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