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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.

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
Dies
Fact
Facts
Trying
Readiness
Indeed
Prove
Ready
Opinion

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

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Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.
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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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Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.
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It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.
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They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.
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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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Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
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A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
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The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
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When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
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When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.
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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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Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
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The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
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The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.
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We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
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We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.
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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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In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.
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The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.
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