Eric Hoffer

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

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion; it is an evil government.

It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

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.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.

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

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

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

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

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

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