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People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
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
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Mass
Fanatical
Find
Holy
Grievance
Trying
Cause
Haunted
People
Movement
Nursing
Causes
Unlimited
Purpose
Opportunities
Opportunity
Content
Purposelessness
Lives
Offers
Dedicating
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
Eric Hoffer
What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
Eric Hoffer
EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.
Eric Hoffer
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
Eric Hoffer
...the majority of people cannot endure the bareness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves.
Eric Hoffer
The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer
In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them
Eric Hoffer
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.
Eric Hoffer
Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
Eric Hoffer
There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
We can never have enough of that which we really do not want.
Eric Hoffer
The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.
Eric Hoffer
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
Eric Hoffer
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Eric Hoffer
There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.
Eric Hoffer
