Eric Hoffer Quotes

I must be free... free to do what I like, say what I like, write what I like, within the limits prescribed for me by my own sense of what is seemly and fitting.

There are too many people around keeping me grounded to go off the rails. I'm my own person.

I can't tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I've got a good bead on myself.

All of us should do what we want and have to do. We can only limit ourselves.

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

I made a decision a few years back to never again do anything professionally that I didn't want to do.

That is just a part of my personality, being the voice of reasoning, and it is kind of annoying being that person all the time, but pretty much what you see on 'Total Divas' is who we are as individuals.

Sometimes my brain is saying, 'Go wild on food,' and I'll want to pig out, but I'll tell myself, 'No.' You either want to win or you don't.

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

I have tried to be that player who plays within himself, but I just can't do that.

I'm probably more persuasive than the next person if I want to be, but do I want to be? In my head, I just don't go there.

My whole life, I've been a Temptation.

I have no deep-seated desire to be famous; that's not what's driving me, so if it's something I don't want to do, I don't do it. Maybe it's stubborn, but any choices, if you don't like them, yell at me, because it for sure was my bad.

The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.

Our thoughts and our conduct are our own.

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

The most dangerous of our impulses reign in ourselves against ourselves. To dissolve them is a creative act.

So remember, my meaning of discipline is not that of any Ten Commandments...Your discipline has to come from your very heart, it has to be your own-and there is a great difference. When somebody else gives you the discipline, it can never fit you; it will be like wearing somebody else's clothes. Either they will be too loose or too tight, and you will always feel a little bit silly in them.

I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.

I'm really not good with impulse control.

Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.

You make New Year's resolutions. And you make them into the teeth of old resolutions which were different. Then you don't keep your new resolutions and you tell yourself you are weak-willed. You aren't weak-willed, you are simply obeying yourself as of yesterday.

The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort.

When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.

Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.