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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

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
Corrupts
Weakness
Power
Many
Work
Rudeness

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A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.
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Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
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Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
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Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
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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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Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.
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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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However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
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Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
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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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All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
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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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There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.
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The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
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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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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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It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
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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 effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth
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