Quotes by Eric Hoffer

We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven and who believed that nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

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

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.

Anger is the prelude to courage.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

In the alchemy of mans soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.

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 table, they operate on it with an ax.

If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident.