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The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.

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
Sometimes
Real
Imagined
Different
Rejection
People
Result
Results
Society
Desire
Live

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Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
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The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
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Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
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Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.
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Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
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The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
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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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Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.
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It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
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Those who feel guilty are afraid and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.
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America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.
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I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
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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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We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.
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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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It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
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Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
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If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.
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