It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
Interpretation
Evil can appeal to those who feel powerless by offering them a false sense of strength.
In this quote, Eric Hoffer suggests that individuals who lack power or confidence are often drawn to evil because it provides them with an enticing illusion of control and strength. This attraction to malevolence is rooted in the promise of empowerment, which can lead the weak to align themselves with destructive ideologies or actions in their pursuit of feeling powerful.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the influences of power in politics.
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.
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.
If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.
The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true."
In all people I see myself - none more, and not one a barleycorn less; And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.
I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science.
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