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A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

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
Likely
Strive
Refuse
Society
Superfluities
Ends
Necessities
Refuses
Lacking

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My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.
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We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
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When you automate an industry you modernize it when you automate a life you primitivize it.
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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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Anger is a prelude to courage.
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Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society .
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The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
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The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.
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The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
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A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life
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In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe's craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe's wrath and scorn.
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Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
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Action is basically a reaction against loss of balance - a flailing of the arms to to regain one's balance. To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.
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The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us- the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.
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It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.
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How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
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With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
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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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Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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