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The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

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
Social
Problem
Important
Untalented
Confronts
Troublesome
Engineering
Equally
Provide

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Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society .
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Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
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The necessary has never been man's top priority. The passionate pursuit of the nonessential and the extravagant is one of the chief traits of human uniqueness. Unlike other forms of life, man's greatest exertions are made in the pursuit not of necessities but of superfluities.
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Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors they can be smelled.
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We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
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Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
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We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
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Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.
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Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.
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The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.
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The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
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It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.
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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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Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
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I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
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Resistance, whether to one's appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.
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Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
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It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
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