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If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

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
Keep
Degree
Adolescents
Must
Fantasy
Fantasies
Life
Degrees
Imposing
Everyday
Tastes
Taste
Continuity
Society
Preserve
Values
Preserves
Learn
Stability

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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.
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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.
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We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.
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A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.
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This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter
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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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Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
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Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
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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.
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A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.
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