Eric Hoffer - Quodid

About

Picture of Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American philosopher and social critic. A moderate with an atypical working-class background, Hoffer wrote ten books over his career and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change (1963) was his finest work. The Eric Hoffer Book Award is an international literary prize established in his honor. The University of California, Berkeley awards an annual literary prize named jointly for Hoffer.

Quotes from Eric Hoffer

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people.

Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

skill faith mountains

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

power faith corruption absolutes

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

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

We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.

Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

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