Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric Hoffer

Hope, for Hoffer, isn’t a virtue; it’s a lever. He splits it into two time horizons that produce opposite political and psychological effects: the near-term promise that makes people move, and the far-off promise that makes them sit still. “Around-the-corner” hope is kinetic. It implies imminence, a deadline, a tangible next step. It’s the kind of expectation that turns grievance into organizing, sacrifice into “just a little longer,” and private doubt into collective momentum.

The sting is in the second clause: “distant hope acts as an opiate.” Hoffer is borrowing the cadence of Marx’s “opium” line, but he’s aiming less at religion than at any narrative that postpones relief indefinitely. A vague, future-facing redemption can soothe pain without threatening the structures causing it. People endure the present because the payoff is always safely out of reach; power loves that arrangement.

Context matters: Hoffer wrote in the shadow of mass movements and totalitarianism, watching how ideologies recruit by offering a near, electrifying transformation, then govern by extending the horizon. The subtext is a warning to both leaders and followers. Leaders can weaponize “soon” to mobilize bodies, then switch to “someday” to manage disappointment. Followers, meanwhile, have to interrogate whether a promise has a timetable, a mechanism, and a cost, or whether it’s just anesthesia dressed up as optimism.

It’s a cold sentence, but it’s also practical: hope is only politically honest when it can be cashed.