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It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.
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
Impelled
Hebrew
Craving
Invent
Ancient
Atheism
Whose
People
Hebrews
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.
Eric Hoffer
For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
Eric Hoffer
To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.
Eric Hoffer
Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
Eric Hoffer
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
Eric Hoffer
Though dissenters seem to question everything in sight, they are actually bundles of dusty answers and never conceived a new question. What offends us most in the literature of dissent is the lack of hesitation and wonder.
Eric Hoffer
The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.
Eric Hoffer
We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.
Eric Hoffer
The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
Eric Hoffer
The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
Eric Hoffer
In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.
Eric Hoffer
Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.
Eric Hoffer
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.
Eric Hoffer
Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies.
Eric Hoffer
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
Eric Hoffer
There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.
Eric Hoffer
It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
Eric Hoffer
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.
Eric Hoffer
Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.
Eric Hoffer
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience... The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending -- for making a show -- and also a readiness to identify themselves wholly with an imposing spectacle.
Eric Hoffer
