Eric Hoffer

No one has a right to happiness

To the intellectual, America's unforgivable sin is that it has revolutions without revolutionaries, and achieves the momentous in a matter-of-fact way

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.

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

Intolerance is the ''Do Not Touch'' sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee which covers our baldness.

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.

Friendship Never explain -- your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe it anyway. A real friend never gets in your way, unless you happen to be on the way down. A friend is someone you can do nothing with and enjoy it. However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.

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

The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

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

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

Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around change prepares the ground for revolution.

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.