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America is still the best country for the common man -- white or black ... if he can't make it here he won't make it anywhere else.

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
Men
Black
Else
Stills
America
Still
Best
Anywhere
Country
Common
Make
White

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In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.
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Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
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There is a time when the word eventually has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.
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The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
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The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
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Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.
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Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
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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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There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for.
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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.
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
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For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.
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In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe's craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe's wrath and scorn.
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Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
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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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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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Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
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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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