Ian Cunningham

“To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.40”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

“Unless a man has the 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.’ 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?”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements