Eric Hoffer

“It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.”

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.”

“We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.”

“It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.”

“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.”

“Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.”

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

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

“Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.”

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”

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

“No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.”

“Animals often strike us as passionate machines.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.”

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

“To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.”