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.
As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.
Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.