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A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
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
Free
Minimum
Social
Threat
Sense
Function
Order
Intellectual
Much
Leadership
Worth
Workingman
Economy
Automated
Society
Anathema
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer
The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.
Eric Hoffer
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.
Eric Hoffer
Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
Eric Hoffer
Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
Eric Hoffer
The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer
The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
Eric Hoffer
No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
Eric Hoffer
Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.
Eric Hoffer
To change everything, simply change your attitude.
Eric Hoffer
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
Eric Hoffer
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
A good sentence is a key . It unlocks the mind of the reader.
Eric Hoffer
Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.
Eric Hoffer
The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
Eric Hoffer
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
Eric Hoffer
A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
Eric Hoffer
