Quotes by Hoffer, Eric

"A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time."

Hoffer, Eric on greatness   

"Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible."

Hoffer, Eric on habit   

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness."

Hoffer, Eric on happiness
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"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life."

Hoffer, Eric on hatred
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"A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor."

Hoffer, Eric on heresy   

"The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle."

Hoffer, Eric on history and historians
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"Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake."

Hoffer, Eric on humankind   

"Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity."

Hoffer, Eric on ignorance   

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

Hoffer, Eric on imitation   

"It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it."

Hoffer, Eric on immigration
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"It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations --past and present --are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia."

Hoffer, Eric on individuality   

"It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence."

Hoffer, Eric on influence   

"Intolerance is the Do Not Touch sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness."

Hoffer, Eric on intolerance   

"We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white."

Hoffer, Eric on judgment and judges   

"Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind."

Hoffer, Eric on kindness
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"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."

Hoffer, Eric on learning
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"We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves."

Hoffer, Eric on lies and lying
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"Animals often strike us as passionate machines."

Hoffer, Eric on animals   

"The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood."

Hoffer, Eric on literature   

"There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other."

Hoffer, Eric on living together   

"It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men."

Hoffer, Eric on malice   

"Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength."

Hoffer, Eric on manners
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"There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other, and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer the brotherhood of man than ever before."

Hoffer, Eric on masses   

"The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity."

Hoffer, Eric on mediocrity   

"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

Hoffer, Eric on minorities
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"A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness."

Hoffer, Eric on misers and misery   

"When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it."

Hoffer, Eric on modern and modernism   

"It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music."

Hoffer, Eric on music   

"Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect."

Hoffer, Eric on nationalities and nationalism   

"Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines."

Hoffer, Eric on nature   

"The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities."

Hoffer, Eric on necessity   

"A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed."

Hoffer, Eric on negotiation   

"It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor."

Hoffer, Eric on neighbors
4 fans of this quote   

"The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning."

Hoffer, Eric on novelty   

"To the old, the new is usually bad news."

Hoffer, Eric on novelty   

"More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle."

Hoffer, Eric on obscurity   

"To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question."

Hoffer, Eric on obvious   

"It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities."

Hoffer, Eric on opportunity   

"It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents."

Hoffer, Eric on opportunity   

"Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented."

Hoffer, Eric on originality