Eric Hoffer Quotes

Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

One pits his wits against apparently inscrutable nature, wooing her with ardor but nature is blind justice who cannot recognize personal identity.

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigor of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

For science, the end of the evolution struggle is simply represented by 'survival.' As for the means to that end, apparently anything goes. Darwinism leaves humanity without a moral compass.

Throughout evolution, ostracism was death indeed.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

Thus by survival of the fittest, the militant type of society becomes characterized by profound confidence in the governing power, joined with a loyalty causing submission to it in all matters whatever

I should premise that I use the term “Struggle for Existence” in a large and Metaphorical Sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) success in leaving progeny.

What the evolutionist believes, on the basis of a mass of what seems to him un-refuted and irrefutable scientific evidence, is that the plants and animals and man and woman were not created by some sudden supernatural treatment of clay and ribs, but that they have slowly and gradually come into existence through the orderly processes of Nature extending over much time. He sees a fine and awe-inspiring order throughout Nature, some of which can be discovered and, in a measure, understood. He sees in this order, this immense capacity for natural being and doing and becoming, a beauty and majesty in Nature which cannot be transcended in conception. In recognizing the creation of man as its supreme achievement, he sees no belittling of man, but a proof of the extraordinary potentialities of this natural order. In organic evolution he sees just what the name signifies, the unfolding of organized matter, the outrolling of the possibilities of life.

Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.