Frasi di Eric Hoffer

pagina 7

“Puoi scoprire ciò che più teme il tuo nemico osservando i mezzi di cui si serve per spaventarti.”

“La coscienza di un'anima è proporzionata al numero di verità che può sopportare.”

“Non c'è solitudine più grande della solitudine di un fallito. Il fallito è un estraneo nella sua stessa casa.”

“Per conoscere la religione di una persona non dobbiamo ascoltare la fede che dice di professare, ma dobbiamo trovare il suo tipo di intolleranza.”

“La cosa notevole è che noi davvero amiamo il nostro prossimo come noi stessi: noi facciamo agli altri quello che vorremmo fosse fatto a noi stessi. Noi odiamo gli altri quando odiamo noi stessi. Noi siamo tolleranti verso gli altri quando tolleriamo noi stessi. Noi perdoniamo gli altri quando noi perdoniamo noi stessi. Noi siamo proni a sacrificare gli altri quando siamo pronti a sacrificare noi stessi.”

“Noi non ci sentiamo veramente grati nei confronti di quelle persone che fanno realizzare i nostri sogni; esse rovinano i nostri sogni.”

“Quando le persone sono libere di fare a modo loro, in genere si mettono ad imitarsi a vicenda.”

“La maleducazione è un'imitazione di forza dell'uomo debole.”

“A volte sentiamo la perdita di un pregiudizio come perdita di vigore.”

“Anche l'imprevedibilità può diventare monotona.”

“Aver subito un'ingiustizia è avere uno scopo nella vita.”

“Gli uomini si stancano tanto perché non fanno le cose che vogliono fare quanto perché fanno le cose che non vogliono fare.”

“I fatti sono controrivoluzionari.”

“L'individuo che deve giustificare la propria esistenza attraverso i propri sforzi è eternamente schiavo di se stesso.”

“L'inizio del pensiero è il disaccordo – non solo con gli altri ma anche con noi stessi.”

“La fede assoluta corrompe in modo altrettanto assoluto quanto il potere assoluto.”

“La giovinezza in se stessa è un talento non duraturo.”

“La dissipazione è una forma di autosacrificio.”

“Quando ci sono le capacità tecniche necessarie a smuovere le montagne, non c'è bisogno della fede che smuove le montagne.”

“Quando crediamo di possedere l'unica verità, è probabile che siamo indifferenti alle normali verità quotidiane.”

“Quando si automatizza un'industria la si rende più moderna; ma quando si tenta di farlo con la vita, la si rende primitiva.”

“Siamo più predisposti a generalizzare il cattivo del buono. Sostenendo che il cattivo è più potente e contagioso.”

“Siamo soliti pensare che una rivoluzione sia causa di profondi cambiamenti. In realtà accade proprio il contrario: il cambiamento prepara gli animi alla rivoluzione.”

“Un castigo spesso implica che facciamo a noi stessi quello che abbiamo fatto ad altri.”

“Un uomo in grado di trasformare gli ostacoli in opportunità dimostra di possedere una profonda umanità.”

“Mi aggrappo ai miei pregiudizi, sono i testicoli della mia mente.”

“We take for granted the need to escape the self. Yet the self can also be a refuge. In totalitarian countries the great hunger is for private life. Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity.”

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

“Once the stage is set, the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable. Without him there will be no movement.”

“It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.”

“Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

“We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

“Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”

“When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.”

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”

“It is not good for our efforts at self-realization to know the opinions other people have of us. It is difficult or perhaps impossible to be ourselves if we are known.”

“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action.”

“Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.”

“It is a talent of the weak to persuade themselves that they suffer for something when they suffer from something; that they are showing the way when they are running away; that they see the light when they feel the heat; that they are chosen when they are shunned.”

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

“Not only are oppression and exploitation an old story in Asia, but the colonial regimes of the British in lndia and of the Dutch in lndonesia were fairly beneficient—more so perhaps than any regime those countries ever had or are likely to have for some time. I am convinced that were the Western colonial powers a hundred times more beneficent, and had they been animated from very beginning by the purest philantropic motives, their impact on the Orient would still have had the fateful consequences we are witnessing at present.”

“We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.”

“Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.”

“We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.”

“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.”

“To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.”

“A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words.”

“The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.”

“Good writing, like gold, combines lustrous lucidity with high density. What this means is good writing is packed with hints.”

“The beginning of thought is in disagreement — not only with others but also with ourselves.”

“It is precisely because we can never really know ourselves, but only guess, that we are so vehement about the good and the evil ascribed to us by others. In maintaining ourselves against all comers, we are maintaining something that is unknown, uncertain, and never wholly provable. We need a chorus of consent, and we are engaged in an unceasing proselytizing campaign in our own behalf.”

“It's disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals… You take a conventional man of action, and he's satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn't want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there's soul-raping going on.”