Wealth & Money Quote by Eric Hoffer

Disappointment, for Hoffer, isnt a bruised feeling; its insolvency. That metaphor does a lot of work. Bankruptcy is public, humiliating, the end result of arithmetic you cant argue with. By framing disappointment as a balance-sheet collapse, Hoffer pulls it out of the realm of tender personal drama and into the colder logic of overextension: you dont just get hurt, you default. The line snaps hope into something spent, not possessed. Hope becomes currency, and expectation becomes credit, which is precisely Hoffer's point about modern emotional life: we treat the future like a loan were entitled to cash.

The subtext is a warning against the moral hazard of optimism. Not optimism as cheerfulness, but as entitlement. If you "expend too much", the problem isnt fate's cruelty; its your budgeting. Hoffer is skeptical of the inner consumer who keeps buying visions of how things should turn out, then blames the world when the delivery fails. That skepticism reflects his broader interest in mass movements and the psychology of grievance: people with depleted inner accounts are easier to recruit, because they need someone to underwrite their sense of loss.

Context matters. Writing in the mid-century American moment of rising prosperity and ideology, Hoffer watched big promises collide with ordinary limits. The quote reads like a piece of stoic accounting for an era intoxicated with guarantees. Its not anti-hope so much as pro-solvency: keep expectations proportionate, or disappointment wont just visit you; it will repossess you.