Time & Perspective Quote by Eric Hoffer

History, Hoffer suggests, isn’t a town hall meeting; it’s a high-stakes match in which the loudest players are the saints and the monsters, while everyone else becomes the field. The line is engineered to sting because it refuses the comforting civics-myth that “the people” steer the ship. Instead, it frames the majority as ballast: necessary weight, rarely hands on the wheel.

The brilliance is in the phrase “over the heads.” It’s not just that elites and extremists act without consent; it’s that they act above comprehension, bypassing the ordinary citizen’s bandwidth, time, and appetite for upheaval. “The best and the worst” is a deliberately symmetrical pairing: reformers and fanatics share a crucial trait, intensity. Both are willing to gamble reputation, safety, and stability to force change. The “middle” is defined not by stupidity or virtue but by moderation - a sensible instinct that becomes politically exploitable when the stakes are raised by those who don’t mind breaking things.

Context matters. Hoffer wrote in the long shadow of mass movements: fascism, communism, world war, the propaganda state. A former longshoreman turned social critic, he distrusted both utopian crusaders and demagogues, especially when they mobilize ordinary people as raw material. The subtext is a warning about passivity: the middle doesn’t lose because it’s wrong; it loses because it prefers normal life, and “normal life” is easy to play over when extremists and visionaries agree that urgency justifies shortcuts.