Quote

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

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
Find
Knowledge
Without
Fact
Hard
White
Reservations
Kind
Hate
Wholly
Never
Black
Apply
Love
Facts
Prevent
Others
Judgment
Cannot
Seeing

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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility
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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
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...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.
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The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.
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The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.
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An easygoing person is probably more accessible to the realization of eternity--the endless flow of life and death--than one who takes his prospects and duties overseriously. It is the overserious who are truly frivolous.
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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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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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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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Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.
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We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.
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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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