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The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer

Quote Author: Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1898 - May 21, 1983) was an American social writer. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer , published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen. This book, which he considered his best [ citation needed ] , established his reputation [ citation needed ] . He remained a successful [ citation needed ] writer for most of his remaining years.

Other Eric Hoffer Quotes

It is often the failure who is the pioneer of new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future. Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophesies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.

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

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

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are.... Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware ... still clinging to things that no longer exist.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

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

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

We usually see only the things we are looking for so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the 'learned' find themselves fully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self esteem ...

They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.

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

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

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

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action — the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome. De Tocqueville points out that it is at times when passions start to govern human affairs that ideas are most obviously translated into political action. The translation of ideas into action is usually in the hands of people least likely to follow rational motives. Hence, it is that action is often the nemesis of ideas, and sometimes of the men who formulate them. One of the marks of the truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action — the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes — we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.

The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else — we are the busiest people in the world.

To believe that is we could but have this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature — by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals — as by turning him into a machine. Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human. 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. It is also obvious that when man domesticated animals and plants he acquired self-made machines for the production of food, power, and beauty.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem; we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.

We can never have enough of that which we really do not want.

We feel free when we escape — even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.

We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.

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

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

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

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

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

Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him — and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

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.

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

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.

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

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.

We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate.

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

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

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

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.

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.

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

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

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.

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

The greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

A man by himself is in bad company.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.

Youth itself is a talent — a perishable talent.

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