Eric Hoffer Quotes

Credulity as a character trait is encouraged in every child who grows up with religious training, which invariably insists on the virtue of blind faith and the sinfulness of doubting and questioning.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

Credulity is always ridiculous.

Many people believe everything others say, even though what they see with their own eyes, should be enough to tell them otherwise.

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence.

People should be more passive with what they consider trustworthy.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.

Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.

Everyone underestimates the maturity of kids.

Those who know nothing must believe everything.

He that believes all misseth; he that believes nothing, hits not.

I don't discount belief. I just discount most of the things that people believe in.

Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.

We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.

The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.

Incredulity is the wisdom of the fool.

The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Scientists are the easiest to fool. ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors-they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.