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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.

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
Good
Starts
Rise
Mass
Humor
Milieu
Movement
Racket
Causes
Degenerates
Ends
Corporation
America
Cult

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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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Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday 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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Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
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There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.
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To change everything, simply change your attitude.
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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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Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
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Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
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How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
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It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.
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No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
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We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.
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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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My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.
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Communists are frustrated capitalists.
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A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
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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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