Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric Hoffer

Respectability is Hoffer's real villain here, not cowardice. Fear is common; what alarms him is the moment fear gets dressed up as prudence, realism, even morality. Once the culture gives cowardice a clean haircut and a good suit, it stops looking like a personal failing and starts looking like good citizenship. That is why "followers are without number": the weak join because they need permission, the strong join because they crave cover.

Hoffer, a self-taught longshoreman-philosopher who wrote about mass movements and the seductions of belonging, understood how quickly private hesitations become public norms. The line "it easily becomes a fashion" is the coldest part of the quote. He is not picturing a tyrant imposing fear from above; he is picturing a crowd trading courage for social approval, the way people adopt a style because it reduces friction. Fashion requires no argument, only a sense of what's safe to be seen wearing.

The subtext is a warning about moral contagion. When institutions, media, or leaders reward retreat - calling it "being responsible", "keeping the peace", "not making trouble" - the incentive structure flips. Dissent begins to look gauche. Risk starts to feel impolite. Hoffer's phrasing also refuses the comforting story that cowardice belongs only to the powerless; he implicates the competent and secure, the ones who could afford bravery but prefer the social dividends of conformity.

It's a compact diagnosis of how democracies, workplaces, even friend groups slide: not through dramatic betrayal, but through the slow normalization of self-protective silence.