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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.

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
Certitude
Chiefly
Gossip
Thus
Personality
Character
People
Hearsay

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To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.
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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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Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.
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It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
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The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.
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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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To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
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When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors they can be smelled.
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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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What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
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Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
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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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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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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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Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.
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It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
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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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