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Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.

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
Lack
Cause
Causes
Opportunity
Paucity
Potent
Unlimited
Frustration
Opportunities

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People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
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It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction and between profession and practice - that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt - are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.
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Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
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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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A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
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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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To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
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The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
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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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A good sentence is a key . It unlocks the mind of the reader.
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We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true they ruin our dreams.
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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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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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The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
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Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.
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Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.
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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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In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
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There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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