Eric Hoffer Quotes

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.

Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.

No man can lead mean, we have to have unity.

A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That's just self-righteousness - incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic.

Work with people who believe what you believe.

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

The oneness of community for instance is at the heart of our culture.

If we want unity, we must all be unifiers. If we want accountability, each of us must be accountable for all we do.

People working together in a strong community with a shared goal and a common purpose can make the impossible possible.

When I am talking about "It Takes a Village", I'm obviously not talking just about or even primarily about geographical villages any longer, but about the network of relationships and values that do connect us and binds us together.

It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

Without unity, the country will face disaster.

We dream of nation-building. We cannot achieve this by fomenting social divisions.

God designed humans to live in community.

The feeling of community… is really what gives a sense, a purpose to a society.

I wrote '33 Men' in eight weeks. Not only was it a combination of simultaneously writing and interviewing, but as I dug deeper into the miners' story, I found the key to their success was the ability to place their individuality on the back burner and bring forward the sense of a collective group responsibility.

When your goal is to bring together the country in a substantive way to say that we're united by values and more - that are - you know, stronger than the things that divide us. That could be a moment.

People need to understand, we can come together as a nation; we can create a culture of life.

Our alliance is born, not of fear, but of hope. It is an alliance that advances what we are for, as well as opposes what we are against.

We have no sense of the collective anymore in America. The response to Katrina was proof positive of that.

We have to truly become a united people of the United States of America, and divisiveness cannot make that happen.

We have to start thinking of America as a family. We have to stop screeching screeching at each other, stop hurting each other, and instead start caring for, sacrificing for and sharing with each other ... We cannot move forward if cynics and critics swoop down and pick apart anything that goes wrong, to a point where we lose sight of what is right, decent and uniquely good about America.

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.