The True Believer Quotes

“إن الذين لا يجدون صعوبة فى خداع انفسهم لا يجدون صعوبة فى خداع الاخرين لهم، ومن ثم فمن السهل اقناعهم وقيادتهم”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“لا شيء يعزّز ثقتنا بالنفس ويساعدنا على العيش معها كالقدرة المستمرة على الإبداع: أن نرى الأشياء تنمو وتكبر بين أيدينا يوماً بعد يوم.
وليس من المستبعد أن يكون اختفاء الحرف اليدوية في الأوقات المعاصرة سبباً في تزايد الإحباط وفي انجذاب الفرد إلى الحركات الجماهيرية.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“كلما استحال على الإنسان أن يدعي التفوق لنفسه، كلما سهل عليه يدّعي التفوق لأمته، أو لدينه أو لعرقه، أو لقضيته المقدسة.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“ والملل هو الذي فسر لنا ظواهر أخرى:
كثرة العوانس والسيدات اللواتي تجاوزن منتصف العمر في بدايات الحركات الجماهيرية. حتى عندما نكون بصدد حركة لا ترحب بعمل المرأة خارج المنزل ، كانازية مثلا ، نجد نساء يؤدين دورا كبيرا في نشأة الحركة. هناك شبه من نوع ما ،
بين إنضمام المرأة إلى زوج وإنضمامها إلى حركة جماهيرية ففي كلتا الحالتين هنالك هدف جديد وهوية جديدة -اسم جديد-.
إن الملل الذي تشعر به العوانس والنساء اللواتي لم يعد بوسعهن العثور على السعادة والرضا في زواج ناتج أساسا عن ضيقهن بحياة عقيمة فاشلة.
وعندما يعتنق هؤلاء النسوة قضية مقدسة يسخرنلها وجودهن كله وطاقتهم كلها ، فإنهن يجدن حياة جديدة مليئة بالمعنى والهدف!!! ص100”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“إن المساواة بلا حرية تخلق نظامًا إجتماعيًا أكثر إستقرارًا من الحرية بلا مساواة”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Nature of the Desire for Change:

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others.12 No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“إن اليأس الذي تسببه البطالة لا ينبع من خوف الفقر فحسب ، وإنما من مواجهة مستقبل من الفراغ. والعاطلون ينزعون إلى اتباع الذين يبيعونهم الأمل قبل اتباع الذين يقدمون لهم العون”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth. It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. […] The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. […] If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or “of those who are to be.” We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“In modern times, nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm, and that nationalist fervor must be tapped if the drastic changes projected and initiated by revolutionary enthusiasm are to be consummated.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole -- the church, party, nation -- and not to his fellow true believer.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“إن الآراء الفجة التي قد تصدر عن عدد من قادة الحركات الجماهيرية والعصرية قد تدفع المرء إلى الاعتقاد بأن قدرًا من السذاجة ينفع القائد، إن هذه الملاحظة غير صحيحة.
لم تكن سذاجة هتلر أو آمي ميكفرسون هي التي مكّنتهما من اجتذاب الأتباع؛ كان السبب الثقة المطلقة في النفس؛ هذه الثقة التي تُمكّن القائد من عرض أفكاره، مهما كانت مشوشة أو سطحية، بكل جرأة وإعتداد، ويمكن للقائد الحكيم الذي يتبع مسار حكمته إلى النهاية أن يحقق قدرًا مماثلًا من النجاح. الأفكار في حد ذاتها لا تلعب سوى دورًا صغيرًا في قيادة الحركة الجماهيرية، ما يهم هو المبادرات الجريئة والقدرة على تجاهل آراء الآخرين، وعلى تحدي العالم بأسره.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“إن إحباطنا عندما نملك الكثير ونريد المزيد يفوق إحباطنا عندما لا نملك شيئاً ونريد القليل.
نحن أقل تذمراً حين نفقد أشياءاً كثيرة منا، حين لا نفقد إلا شيئاً واحداً.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“لن نشعر أن لدينا شيئاً نستحق العيش من أجله ما لم نكن مستعدين للموت في سبيله.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“On the other hand, there is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future. Thus, though a mass movement at first turns its back on the past, it eventually develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a distant glorious past. Religious movements go back to the day of creation; social revolutions tell of a golden age when men were free, equal, and independent; nationalist movements revive or invent memories of past greatness.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind. Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one. The same is true of the force which drives them on to expansion and world dominion. There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man’s reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. Never, says de Tocqueville, had humanity been prouder of itself nor had it ever so much faith in its own omnipotence.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements