Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
Eric Hoffer
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Eric Hoffer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 25
Died: 1983
Died: May 21
Philosopher
Psychologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Generalize
Generalization
Potent
Prone
Contagious
Assume
Assuming
Good
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
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 millenia.
Eric Hoffer
Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.
Eric Hoffer
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer
We can never have enough of that which we really do not want.
Eric Hoffer
Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.
Eric Hoffer
Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.
Eric Hoffer
To change everything, simply change your attitude.
Eric Hoffer
To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer
One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
Eric Hoffer
In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.
Eric Hoffer
Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.
Eric Hoffer
Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
Eric Hoffer
The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.
Eric Hoffer
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
Eric Hoffer
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Eric Hoffer
What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
Eric Hoffer
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. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
Eric Hoffer
Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
Eric Hoffer
Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.
Eric Hoffer