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To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

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
Grows
Feels
Freedom
Prohibition
Mean
Free
Condition
Conscience
Opportunity
Conditions
Means
Perhaps
True
Grow
Reason
Respect
Feel

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

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For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
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Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
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Naivete in grownups is often charming but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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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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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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All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.
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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.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul.
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To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.
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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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Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
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We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.
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The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
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Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
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It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
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Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
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The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.
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Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
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Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.
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