Thread by @StewGlobal

1. “The true believer is everywhere on the march…and whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature.”

2. "When hopes are dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them."

3. “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation...Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

4. "The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless."

5. "When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program."

6. "Every mass movement is in a sense a migration-a movement toward a promised land; and, when feasible and expedient, an actual migration takes place."

7. "The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle."

8. "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." #Hoffer

9. “All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium..."

10. “To a religious movement the present is a place of exile, a vale of tears leading to the heavenly kingdom; to a social revolution it is a mean way station on the road to Utopia; to a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode preceding the final triumph."

11. "What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as they decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so." #TheTrueBeliever

12. "Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more - and there is. By expatiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation."

13. "It is as if they said: 'Not only our blemished selves, but the lives of all our contemporaries, even the most happy and successful, are worthless and wasted.' Thus by deprecating the present they acquire a vague sense of equality." #EricHoffer

14. "The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude ... to be effective a doctrine does not have to be understood, but has rather to be believed in."

15. “The chief preoccupation of an active mass movement is to instill in its followers a facility for united action … by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and judgment of its own.”

16. “The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to.”