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

About Eric Hoffer

Portrait 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...

More quotations from Eric Hoffer

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

We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.

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

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

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

power faith corruption absolutes

More quotations tagged with “freedom”

This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.

—Daniel Ellsberg

freedom privacy USA liberty

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

justice freedom responsibility equality ownship

You must find out for yourself what it is you love to do. Don’t think in terms of choosing a vocation in order to fit into society, because in that way you will never discover what you love to do. When you love to do something, there is no problem of choice. When you love, and let love do what it will, there is right action, because love never seeks success, it is never caught up in imitation; but if you give your life to something which you don’t love, you will never be free.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things

love freedom vocation career society self-discovery right action success

True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being—free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies—and therefore you can find out what religion is.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things

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A lack of freedom is no longer, in most developed societies, the problem. Our downfall lies in our inability to make the most of the freedom that our ancestors painfully secured for us over three centuries.

—Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists

freedom difficulty

History

30 Aug 2013 Added