People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that ungrateful individuals often show loyalty to their oppressors instead of those who help them.
Eric Hoffer's quote highlights a paradox of human behavior where those who receive kindness and support may turn against their benefactors in favor of oppressive figures. It reflects on the nature of ingratitude and the surprising tendencies of individuals to align themselves with authority rather than loyalty to those who provide for them.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about workplace dynamics where employees show ingratitude.
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.
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.
Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both.
Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the crudest words.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
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