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Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
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
Praise
Literature
Disinclination
Process
Alibi
Thought
Infrequently
Think
Exaggerating
Thinking
Exaggerate
Exaggeration
Refusal
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future but an excuse can last for life.
Eric Hoffer
We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
Eric Hoffer
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.
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
The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.
Eric Hoffer
The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.
Eric Hoffer
Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
Eric Hoffer
An empty head is not really empty it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
Eric Hoffer
Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
Eric Hoffer
In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
Eric Hoffer
Facts are counterrevolutionary.
Eric Hoffer
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
Eric Hoffer
When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
Eric Hoffer
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
Eric Hoffer
There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
Eric Hoffer
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
Eric Hoffer
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
Eric Hoffer
Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.
Eric Hoffer
