Eric Hoffer Quotes

The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?

I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

Feast of the Holy Innocents The most thrilling thing you can ever do is win someone to Christ. And it's contagious. Once you do it, you don't want to stop.

Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?

Things I've done in the past always make me cringe a bit. When I think back to being a Christian. Proselytising to people, that makes me cringe.

At first, we were militant about our faith, really in people's faces. We used to say, 'I don't care if they kick us off the stage - I'm gonna tell them about Jesus!' But what good did that do? They never invited us back to the club.

I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.

Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.

Throughout history, most of the wrongs of the world have resulted from people absolutely sure they were in the right.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.

In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.

Truth is the hardest substance in the world to pin down. But the one certainty is the awesome penalty exacted sooner or later from a society whose reporters stop trying.

The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.

Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.

Let's quit fiddling with religion and do something to bring the world to Christ.

I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to "the truth." The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.

there is no fanatic like a religious fanatic.

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.

When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.