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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

More quotations tagged with “power”

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper.

—Dr. Thomas Fuller

To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it.

—Charles Caleb Colton

The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good.

—Baltasar Gracián

You see what power is—holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them!

History

11 Jul 2015 Added