Quote

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

Eric Hoffer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eric Hoffer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 25
Died: 1983
Died: May 21
Philosopher
Psychologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Absolute
Honesty
Half
Truth
Venom
Drops
Add
Absolutes

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

Image
God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: I am what I am. Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: I am what I am not.
Eric Hoffer
Image
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.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Successful action tends to become an end in itself.
Eric Hoffer
Image
We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
Eric Hoffer
Image
It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion , a truth , a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.
Eric Hoffer
Image
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
Eric Hoffer
Image
Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Eric Hoffer
Image
If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
Eric Hoffer
Image
To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer
Image
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
Eric Hoffer
Image
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
Image
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
Eric Hoffer
Image
You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.
Eric Hoffer
Image
We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
Eric Hoffer
Image
People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
Eric Hoffer