Eric Hoffer Quotes

Steal a loaf of bread and they hang you, steal a land and they'll make you king.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

The origin of all revolutions and corruption, and the spur and source of all base morals are just two sayings: The First Saying: 'So long as I'm full, what is it to me if others die of hunger?' The Second Saying: 'You suffer hardship so that I can live in ease; you work so that I can eat.'

The scum of the People are most Tyrannical when they get the Power, and treat their Betters with the greatest Insolence.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

I hate uneducated people having power …

The worker is always in the sun while the landowner is always in the shade.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

One of the most constant laws of history is … immediately [if] any one class becomes preponderant—nobles, clergy, army, or the people—it speedily tends to enslave others.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

Revolution by the have-nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the haves.

The fight is over two fundamentally different ideas about the nature of America. On one side are those who believe that that every hardworking person should be able to rise. On the other are those who believe that wealthy white men should always rule over a permanent class of workers.

The system under which we live is owned and operated by people who do not deserve to run the world.

This is an important thing: People who live in the mainstream and the status quo think that everyone else is there to serve them.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.

The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.

the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease.

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

No one really believes in equality who's on top.

Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

Power is every stealing from the many to the few.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.