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The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.

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
Impulse
Strengthens
Likely
Converting
Develop
Legitimacy
Easily
Fanatics
Whose
Challenged
Faith
Creed
Others
Creeds
Proselytizing
Strongest
Fanatic

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It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.
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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 man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.
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My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting.
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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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The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.
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Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
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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.
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Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.
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All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
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Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
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The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
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people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.
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