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A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.

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
Peace
Orderly
Come
Seed
Without
Pleasant
Things
Seeds
Love
Peaceful
Nation
Malcontents
Perhaps
Malcontent
Nations
Dregs

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There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
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The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
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Successful action tends to become an end in itself.
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The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
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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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A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.
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To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.
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The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
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Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.
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To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
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Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.
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The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
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Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
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I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
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Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
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The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
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The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields.With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.
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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
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People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
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