Eric Hoffer

The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.

The readiness to praise others indicates a desire for excellence and perhaps an ability to realize it.

Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil read more

Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.

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

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

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

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

It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own read more

It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams- in the image of what man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.