The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
Interpretation
A suspicious mind tends to trust its negative assumptions about others rather than questioning them.
This quote by Eric Hoffer suggests that a mindset rooted in suspicion tends to have an overwhelming tendency to believe in the inherent negativity or malice of others. Rather than fostering doubt or skepticism towards one's own thoughts, the suspicious person accepts their doubts as confirmation of a greater evil that lies within everyone, leading to a pervasive sense of mistrust and cynicism in relationships and interactions.
In practice
In a discussion about trust issues in relationships, this quote can illustrate the dangers of a suspicious mindset.
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.
Your house is your larger body.
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.
Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves we collude with it through our apathy.
Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
I am at war with the living, I have come to terms with the dead.
Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
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