747 Quotes by Eric Hoffer

The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.