Anger is the prelude to courage.

— Eric Hoffer

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

— Eric Hoffer

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

— Eric Hoffer

Children are the keys of paradise.

— Eric Hoffer

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

— Eric Hoffer

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

— Eric Hoffer

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

— Eric Hoffer

Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

— Eric Hoffer

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined doing.

— Eric Hoffer

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

— Eric Hoffer