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If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

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
Accomplished
Sentences
Anybody
Written
Asks
Good

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

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It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer
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The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.
Eric Hoffer
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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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To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.
Eric Hoffer
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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
Eric Hoffer
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We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common.
Eric Hoffer
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
Eric Hoffer
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We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true they ruin our dreams.
Eric Hoffer
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The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Eric Hoffer
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The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
Eric Hoffer
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When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die young and playful.
Eric Hoffer
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A man's soul is pierced as it were with holes, and as his longings flow through each they are transmuted into something specific.
Eric Hoffer
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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.
Eric Hoffer
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We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
Eric Hoffer
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It is thus with most of us we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
Eric Hoffer
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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.
Eric Hoffer
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When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
Eric Hoffer
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Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.
Eric Hoffer
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A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
Eric Hoffer
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Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.
Eric Hoffer