Quote #99

The Savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets. There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience; a readiness to attempt the impossible; a bias for simple solutions - to cut the knot rather than unravel it; the viewing of compromise as surrender; the tendency to manipulate people and 'experiment with blood.' Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

More from Eric Hoffer

  1. Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities. Disorder does not come from an increa…
  2. The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The trul…
  3. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
  4. It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
  5. A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to sur…
  6. Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunci…
  7. The significant point is that people unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an at…
  8. Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

All Eric Hoffer quotes