Eric Hoffer Quotes

Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human body from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.

There can be no liberty without the law.

If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

No true and perfect human society can be conceived which is not governed by some supreme authority…. Do the sheep when they are all assembled together rule and guide the shepherd?

Arguably, the application of complete libertarianism leads one towards anarchy.

Instead of serving special interests, Congress should focus on the big picture. Globalization and technology have completely reshaped our economy in recent decades, and if we don't respond, we're putting the future of the middle class at risk.

[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

There are all too many who, on account of their notorious ineptitude, thrive better in a rationalist system than in freedom. Freedom is one of those difficult things.

All men are equal and free: society by nature, and destination, is therefore autonomous and ungovernable. If the sphere of activity of each citizen is determined by the natural division of work and by the choice he makes of a profession, if the social functions are combined in such a way as to produce a harmonious effect, order results from the free activity of all men; there is no government. Whoever puts a hand on me to govern me is an usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy.

I've always believed that conservatism is the politics of reality, and that reality ultimately asserts itself in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position.

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits.

When government does its job properly people are free to do theirs.

As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.

Politics [is] the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.

It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.

Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.

After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government.

We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the prices is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

ANARCHISM:The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.