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Successful action tends to become an end in itself.

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
Tends
Successful
Success
Action
Ends
Become

More quotes by Eric Hoffer

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Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
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There is a totalitarian regime inside every one of us. We are ruled by a ruthless politburo which sets our norms and drives us from one five-year plan to another. The autonomous individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.
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The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.
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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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We usually see only the things we are looking for- so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.
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Facts are counterrevolutionary.
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Anger is a prelude to courage.
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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.
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In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them
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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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Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.
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The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.
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What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.
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Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.
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Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.
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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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Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one's religion, nation, race, party or family-what is it but the visualization of that eternal something to which we attach the self that is about to be annihilated?
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The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.
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To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
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It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
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