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The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.

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
Feel
Booted
Feels
Spurred
Intellectuals
Ride
Corruption
Born
Power
Young

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Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.
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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
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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.
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Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.
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You cannot gauge the intelligence of an American by talking with him you must work with him. The American polishes and refines his way of doing things-even the most commonplace-the way the French of the 17th century polished their maxims.
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The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
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Communists are frustrated capitalists.
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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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The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness and both these ends are reached by imitation.
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Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
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It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
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When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.
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Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.
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Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
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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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Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
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The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
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