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The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

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
Mass
Malady
Movement
Aims
Society
Cure
People
Cures
Aim
Offer
Technique
Offers
Infect

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The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
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A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
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The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth
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Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
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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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Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
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We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
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Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.
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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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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
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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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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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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.
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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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Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
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Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.
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First something is a great idea, then it becomes a cause, then it becomes a business and finally it becomes a racket.
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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 cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong it easily becomes a fashion.
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