Eric Hoffer Quotes

People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.

No matter what happens to us in life, we tend to think of it as 'good' or 'bad.' And most of us tend to use the 'bad' label three to 10 times as often as the 'good' label. And when we say something is bad, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such.

Anything that happens that's good, they think, Oh, it's an accident, when is the roof caving in? You've got to get them out of that mental framework.

The good things never stay in your head. Only the bad things live on.

Sometimes pessimism or optimism gets popular, and it's contagious.

We have a tendency to think everyone's idiotic and everyone's only doing something idiotic, and the world is controlled by a not-so-secret group of morons. There's great truth in that, I suppose, but then it's also not true.

For sure, you don't believe the good stuff. I mean, the good stuff is just insane - wacky. If you don't take it too much to heart, it does help when the negative stuff hits. And you know the negative stuff is coming. It's got to! What comes up must come down.

Our thoughts about an event can have a dramatic effect on how we go through the event itself. When our expectations are low, it's easy to be pleasantly surprised. When they're not, we're vulnerable to painful disappointment. Because of this, many people spend a good deal of effort trying to avoid developing high hopes about anything.

It's human nature that if you get 20 positive comments and one negative one, you're going to focus on the negative. We all do that. It can be something that drags you down. It's easy to get bogged down with it, but I try to concentrate on the good things.

I got into the habit of filtering out all the good in my life, focusing on only the negative. I'm not sure why I did it, but it's a pretty depressing state.

You can read 50 great things about yourself, but the one bad thing will be what you remember most.

I'm very realistic in my outlook on everything in life. When I look ahead in my mind to see what's going to happen next, I see the good and I see the bad.

He who spares the bad injures the good.

It does no good to believe in what does not exist to the point one cannot focus on what is real. That would be the greatest tragedy of any 'conspiracy.'

Experience shows us that most people's votes are based on their biases, not on objective reality. Elections are a collective gut reaction. That any good comes of it at all is the miracle of democracy.

I have no doubt that what we started has become a plague. Because - and that's a million years ago but we got caught up in the drama more than we caught up in going after the facts.

We must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

People usually tend to believe grim words rather than positive ones.

All the doomsayers were wrong…. People want to show they are more intelligent by predicting the worst case scenario.

There is a tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the possibility of negative things

The public never knows what he wants, but he always wants what he knows.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

If you see one negative person a lot of people start to get negative, and that's not good for any time.