Eric Hoffer Quotes

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

While it is true that our enemies are ruthless fanatics, the solution is not for us to become zealous ourselves so that we remake our society in the image of those that would attack us.

Those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.

We love death as much as the Westerners love life. Therefore we will win.

Our enemy is hatred - the hatred inherent in fundamentalism.

Jihadis want to watch the world burn, to bring everything crashing down, to destroy the establishment and rebuild it after their own pitiless vision. This misguided utopianism is what makes them such effective bogeymen.

A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.

There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

As Hitler himself later enunciated, it matters not how idiotic the creed, what matters is the firmness with which it is enunciated.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

I have no wife whom I love so well that I would not put a javelin through her heart, and I would do it with clean hands.

Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you're certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have - that certainty is something to be guarded about.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians. [They don't] care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don't care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship.

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

Whether you were Moslem, Christian, Druze, or Israeli, remember, God protect thee, that religious fanaticism for political goals or political fanaticism for religious purposes is the worst kind of fanaticism.

Evil is international and the fanatic is international and universal. There is no difference between a Muslim fanatic, a Christian fanatic, even a secular fanatic.

I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.

The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.