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.
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.
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