Eric Hoffer

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

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.

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.

There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

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.

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

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

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

There is a time when the word "eventually" has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.