A Quote by Eric Hoffer

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

Eric Hoffer

Quote Topics

Against Agreement Inner Monstrous Persecuted Prejudice Prevailing Souls Them Which

Quote Author

Eric Hoffer
American - Writer
July 25, 1898 - May 21, 1983

Nonconformity is an empty goal, and rebellion against prevailing opinion merely because it is prevailing should no more be praised than acquiescence to it. Indeed, it is often a mask for cowardice, and few are more pathetic than those who flaunt outer differences to expiate their inner surrender.

William H. Whyte

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consiousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would crate such a complex and fancy worm food?

Ernest Becker

It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.

Paul Ricoeur

Just as our parents' souls revolted against God, their bodies revolted against their souls, to which they had been subject. And they realized 'that they were naked.

Alice von Hildebrand

Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.

Pearl S. Buck

Prejudice ... is a subjective emotion which expresses itself upon others only because of an inner necessity for release. The object is irrelevant and opportune. The person who feels prejudice is the victim of himself and his own unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Life is not what he wants it to be and it has not been what he wishes it had been.

Pearl S. Buck

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.

Alan Alda

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.

John Stuart Mill

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I always think that there's a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn't exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.

Andrew Haigh

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

Salman Rushdie

There is no racial or religious prejudice among people in the theater. The only prejudice is against bad actors, especially successful ones.

Helen Hayes

It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

John Jay Chapman

What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

Cormac McCarthy

Is it possible that since I hunt, I may be hunting for the life of my Savior and the blood of the Lamb of God? I have fought against many differing sorts of conscience. Is it beyond all possibility and hazard that I have not fought against God, and that I have not persecuted Jesus in some of them?