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Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

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
Literature
Faith
Considerable
History
Substitute
Lost
Substitutes
Extent
Holy
Cause
Causes

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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
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In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
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We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.
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Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
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In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
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However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
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Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.
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We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.
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Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
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Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
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All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
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A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
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Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.
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You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.
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Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
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The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
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