Eric Hoffer Quotes

We have great power to affect the attitudes and behavior of the people around us, at work and at home. We have the power to set a tone of honor, to create an energy around ourselves that says, 'I respect myself. I respect you. Let's respect each other.'

My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking.

I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast.

The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.

What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.

After I am dead I would like people to say: 'Beuys understood the historical situation. He altered the course of events'. I hope in the right direction.

Attitude is greatly shaped by influence and association.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Women have more inner power for creation, starting from family and home and ending with professional activity and politics.

Vee: And I'm not going to let you sit at home all afternoon with your sour face on. Nora: I don't have a sour face. Vee: Yes, you do. And you're wearing it right now. Nora: This is my annoyed face. You woke me up at six in the morning!

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.

A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.

My job, as an actor, is to entertain people. My contribution to society is to be a respite from everyday life. People go home and watch television or they go to the movies, and they get to escape their reality. But if I can do entertainment that also maybe can educate people, educate myself, move people's hearts and minds, in some way, and bring light to some injustice, that's when entertainment is at its best. And if somebody wants to get more involved in a socially active way, that's when you've done the thing that I've always wanted to be a part of.

Men make history. History does not make the man.

Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.

We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin... one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of 'usefulness', in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples' lives a little bit better?

I would like people not to think in terms of the 755 home runs I hit but think in terms of what I've accomplished off the field and some of the things I stood for.

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

When faced with world problems - like hunger, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, the arms trade - you may be among those who are overwhelmed by a feeling of "Help! What on earth can I, just one person, do about this?" Take heart. That's a sane response. It's the basis for a whole new attitude to world problems, where change at the level of the individual is more and more recognised as essential to change in huge world systems.

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.

One of my half-sisters just couldn't deal with it. I think she saw me as someone she had a hard time relating to. We're super-close now, but I probably came home from Europe with weird opinions and attitudes and weird clothing. I probably looked so different to her, and I couldn't show up for things she would have liked me to. My life picked up speed, and I couldn't really stop the momentum.

I love Mexico because that's where I'm from, but my favorite city, whenever I need to recharge, I love Paris. I get very inspired while I'm there. There's so much art and culture, and Paris, before New York, that was the capital of the world. And I love history too, so I go there. It does something special to me.

Part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, are irresponsible. You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there's some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.