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Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

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
Power
Clamor
Much
Equality
Atmosphere
Lack
Capacity
Achieve
Liberty
Freedom

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Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were the people, and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.
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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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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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In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
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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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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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The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.
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Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.
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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 ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
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Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.
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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 technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
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It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
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Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
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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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Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
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