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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.

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
Weak
Failure
Responsibility
Eagerly
Grandiose
Undertakings
Escape
Throw

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It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
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It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
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There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
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When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
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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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Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.
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Facts are counterrevolutionary.
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Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.
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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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...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
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America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.
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Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
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I can never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.
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The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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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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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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Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.
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Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.
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We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.
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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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