Eric Hoffer Quotes About Responsibility
-
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
→ -
People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
→ -
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, to be free from freedom. It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
→ -
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
→ -
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.
→ -
There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.
→ -
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."
→ -
The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.
→ -
It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
→ -
Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.
→
Related Authors
-
Karen Horney Psychoanalyst -
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Professor -
Edmund Burke Statesman -
Eric Sevareid Journalist -
Anna Freud Psychologist -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Author -
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Author -
Michel de Montaigne Writer -
Eric Berne Author -
-
Erich Fromm Psychologist -
Sidney Poitier Actor -
David D. Burns Author -
Thomas Sowell Economist -
Matt Labash Journalist -
William James Philosopher -
Stanislav Grof Psychiatrist -
John Derbyshire Writer -
M. Stanton Evans Journalist