It was a question from the audience which asked Chris Hedges whether he had ever heard of Eric Hoffer….so I had to look him up. Interesting what I found.
The following is a short sample of the many aphorisms that can be found in Hoffer’s books. Because he believed in the virtue of brevity in the art of writing, nearly every sentence he wrote can stand alone as an individual idea, complete in itself.
“Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life.”
“It is not at all simple to understand the simple.”
“We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.”
“Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us.”
“Spiritual stagnation ensues when man’s environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.”
“Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.”
“The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.”
http://www.erichoffer.net/quotes.html
and here is the CBS interview from 1967. Start with Part 1
An interesting character ! In fact have his ideas not reflected alot of what we have discussed on OTP !?
