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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

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
Vigor
Heresy
Orthodox
Spring
System
Full
Literature
Heretic

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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
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Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
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A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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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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Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
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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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This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter
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Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.
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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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Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.
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The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
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Anger is a prelude to courage.
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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
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We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
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Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
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Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
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