Eric Hoffer Quotes

Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.

The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great force leading to change.

I think that we need to look hard at our beliefs and be responsible about how we speak out.

As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.

America needs to be challenged.

We wrestle with the political issues of who has stewardship over life.

We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented.

No man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.

If, by demanding revolutionary change, I run the risk of accomplishing nothing on behalf of the public, then I'm not sure that's a responsible course of action.

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

There is no shame in black athletes not wanting to be role models, but there should be shame when they don't behave like one. It's a free country and people can do whatever they want. But just because we can doesn't mean we should.

The sins of teachers are the teachers of sin.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

If a policy is wrongheaded, feckless and corrupt, I take it personally and consider it a moral obligation to sound off and not shut up until it's fixed.

I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'm just saying it in the sense of what is it that's really going to bring change.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.