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Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

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
Moral
Proportion
Sense
Genuine
Without
Integrity
Good
Intelligence
Neither
Balance
Taste
Perhaps

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The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.
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The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
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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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The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness and both these ends are reached by imitation.
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To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
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The superficiality of many is a result of deep fears. It takes spare time to think things out it takes free time to mature. People in a hurry may not think well or mature well. The next best is a state of perpetual puerility.
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Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
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Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.
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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.
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In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
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All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
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To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.
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For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
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The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.
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The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
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We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact
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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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If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.
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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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