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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

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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
Model
Breeds
Overcoming
Inferiority
Models
Imitate
Sense
Imitation
Resentment
Inherent
Overcome
Imitators
Impulse
Imitator

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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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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
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I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.
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Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.
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One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.
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EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.
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It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
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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.
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The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
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There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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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.
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Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
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The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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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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Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
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It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
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Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
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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?
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I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
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