Eric Hoffer

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it read more

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves- and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.

Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes read more

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

Whence come these hatreds...? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, read more

Whence come these hatreds...? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others- and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch.

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems read more

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution was struck by the discovery that "in no one of the periods which have followed the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event." He is forced to conclude that "the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.