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Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.

Eric Hoffer

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Eric Hoffer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 25
Died: 1983
Died: May 21
Philosopher
Psychologist
Writer
New York City
New York
Something
Hardest
Ugly
Built
Pretenses
Trust
Pretension
Greatest
Pretense
Beauty
Emptiness
Evil
Hide
Thing
Math

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Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
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The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
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One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
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There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members.
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The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
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Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true they ruin our dreams.
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It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.
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A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
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Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.
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Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.
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Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
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Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
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The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.
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I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.
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The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.
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A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.
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