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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
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
Actually
Opposite
Ends
Apart
Seems
Opposites
Poles
Together
Kinds
Fanatic
Kind
Meet
Moderate
Never
Seem
Fanatics
Though
Moderates
Society
Crowded
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Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
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The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.
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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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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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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
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Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
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The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
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It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.
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It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.
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A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
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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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When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.
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The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.
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To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
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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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