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When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

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
Truth
Believe
Indifferent
Truths
Possession
Likely
Everyday
Common

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We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.
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The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
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It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
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Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
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A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
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Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
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It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
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The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
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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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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
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In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them
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It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
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Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.
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Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.
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Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
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Those who feel guilty are afraid and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.
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Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
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Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.
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There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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