Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
Interpretation
Hatred can be a strong motivator for belief, revealing flaws in faith when removed.
In this quote, Eric Hoffer suggests that hatred can sometimes underpin people's beliefs and identities. When hatred is stripped away, what remains might expose a lack of genuine faith or conviction, implying that some individuals might hold on to beliefs as a reaction against others rather than from true conviction or understanding.
In practice
In a debate about the role of emotions in belief systems, this quote can illustrate how negative feelings shape faith.
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
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.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
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 opportunities 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.
The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
I drew it over my skin like a violins bow, No one would ever hear the song of my shame.
Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, βWhat is God like?β and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
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