Eric Hoffer Quotes

Human beings all mimic each other.

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

Man is an imitative creature.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

Faults are soon copied.

They've imitated me so good that sometimes I hear people copying my mistakes

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle.

Mimicking people was something I did already.

What happens is that the people who are leaders in any field are copied. I mean, there's a reason why every wine newsletter tends to look like mine. They see someone who's been successful, so they sort of copy these same ideas.

You need to talk like your boss and copy their actions. Like, if they cross their legs, you do the same. If people think you're like them, you're more inclined to get what you want out of them.

With success always comes mimicry.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.

As actors you have this trait to imitate very easily. I don't want to imitate anything or limit myself of finding this creature, this woman because I'm looking at magazines and I'm reading comics, and I'm asking people that are avid readers of The Guardians.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in. It's change you can Xerox.

When you play somebody, you pick up a lot of their gestures, his voice, the way he speaks, his body language. You don't often get that opportunity.

I think what happens in the world, and I think it's part human nature and part programming, is we become an emulation of what we see. We become clones of each other.

People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.

We take our colors, chameleon-like, from each other.

Perfect imitations must share the fate of the originals.

Imitators are a slavish herd and fools in my opinion.

Once you start copying other people's licks, you begin thinking they're yours. Doing that's just an easy way out.