Quote

My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.

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
Yards
Truck
Lunch
Towns
Freight
Fields
Distracting
Waiting
Railroad
Done
Railroads
Writing
Noon

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To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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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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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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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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Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
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The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
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When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.
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It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
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Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
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The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
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A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
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The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
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The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
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Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.
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It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.
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