Eric Hoffer Quotes

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members.

Communists are frustrated capitalists.