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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.

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
Unified
Hating
Hated
Common
Hate

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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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It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
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The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
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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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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
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Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
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The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
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It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.
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Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were the people, and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.
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Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
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Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
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Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
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We cannot hate those who we despise.
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It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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The genuine creator creates something that has a life of its own, something that can exist and function without him. This is true not only of the writer, artist and scientist, but of creators in other fields.With the noncreative it is the other way around: in whatever they do, they arrange things so that they themselves become indispensable.
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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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