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The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. God wishes, said Calvin, that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.

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
Born
Seeking
Calvin
Self
Glory
Sustained
Holy
Striving
Cause
Dedication
Question
Wishes
Humanity
Aside
Causes
Compared
Ineffectual
Wish
Strive
Ruthlessness

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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
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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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People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
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The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
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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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A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.
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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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In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
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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.
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
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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.
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The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.
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The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility
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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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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.
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