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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
Undertakings
Escape
Throw
Weak
Failure
Responsibility
Eagerly
Grandiose

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In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.
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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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Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
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Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
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The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
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Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
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Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
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Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.
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Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
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Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
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Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
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The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
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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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People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a have type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a have not type of self.
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