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There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

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
Would
Life
Depended
Understanding
Society
Upon
Living
Political
Together

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A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life
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An empty head is not really empty it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
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Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
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To be aware how fruitful the playful mood can be is to be immune to the propaganda of the alienated, which extols resentment as a fuel of achievement.
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That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.
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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
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We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.
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Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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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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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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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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We cannot hate those who we despise.
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Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
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The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
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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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Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.
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Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.
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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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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
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