Hoffer 4

More from Eric Hoffer. If you don't like his aphorisms as I do, skip this. As before, I've added comments to many of them.

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Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person. I'm one of those who believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person. I guess I'm suspicious. In reality, however, suspicion has nothing to do with it. There is evil every person, and it often comes out.

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom or sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.  I must admit to being a conservative. I picked up sterile radical ideas in my youth, but I let go of them. My ideas have grown and developed.

Those who proclaim the brotherhood of men fight every war as if it were a civil war. Nowadays it's protest and riot.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity. One needs the talents of an animal trainer to deal with the stupid.

The passionate are not as a rule culturally creative, but only they make history.

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth. Actually what it yields in the modern world is accusations and negative appraisals of anyone you don't like.

The true prophet is not he who peers into the future but he who reads and reveals the present. Or pays attention to opinion polls and focus groups. The prophet, today, sees where we are going then runs to the front to lead.

Fear and freedom are mutually exclusive.

To the old, the new is usually bad news. The old are smarter than the rest of us.

America has never ceased to be an experiment. In every generation America has still to prove that a society founded on values cherished by common people can endure, and that it is possible to fuse hordes of heterogeneous immigrants into one nation indivisible.

     [Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising one's levels of aspiration and expectation. (Jack Nicklaus)] It applies to all of society, not just sports.

Everyone expects 1975 [this was written early in 1975] to be a year of decision for the Occident, My fear is that it will be a year of protracted crisis. It is the lingering crisis that debilitates. An explosion would cleanse the air. I would welcome a blowing up of the oil wells in the Persian Gulf. A dramatic end of the fossil-fuel age could be an opening act in the renewal and rebirth of the Occident. The balance of century should be devoted to the search for cheaper and cleaner fuels. In the meantime the Occident should adopt a simpler and slower mode of life and use its manpower in a concerted effort to cleanse and water of pollution, replenish the soil, reforest the hills, and clean up the cities.

Who in the 1950s had a premonition of the witches' sabbath that would be enacted in the 1960s? Once events have taken place, a horde of commentators demonstrate that the unexpected was inevitable. Actually, chance stupidity and cowardice were chief factors. Nothing was inevitable. As I said earlier, evil, as well as stupidity, is lurking in everyone.

To give equality to people who cannot be equal is to intensify their feeling of inequality. So too to give freedom to people who cannot help themselves is to increase their feeling of oppression, Moreover, to give freedom and equality to people who cannot help themselves is to rob them of soul-soothing alibis.

Old age has made me common. I have the typical aches and predicaments of the old. It is true that my nose is not dripping when my head nods in drowsiness and I manage to keep the corners of my mouth clean.

       It is good to remind myself that it is by sheer wild luck that I have in my old age enough money to live on and no money worries at all. So far I have no misfortunes, and at seventy-three I feel that I have won the race. It is true that I am easy on myself. I have a right to an unstrenuous old age. But it must be free of boredom and a feeling of stagnation. This means that I must go on thinking, learning and writing. All I can allow myself is a slower tempo. Mostly this describes me.

The birth of the nineteenth century: the prelude to this most stable and peaceful century was a massive hemorrhage, a twenty-year war. We cannot blame war for the demented savagery of the twentieth century. It is legitimate to wonder whether the nineteenth century would have become what it was had the French come out of the Napoleonic wars as conquerors. The reason the First World War did not wind up the way other wars (including the Second World War) did was that France wanted to be the foremost nation in Europe and would not leave Germany alone. Vive la France. It could use help before it destroys itself.

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More to come, sooner or later.