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People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.
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
Lives
Attractive
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Sufficient
Barren
Whose
Restraint
Seems
Seem
Insecure
Self
Responsibility
Obey
People
Greater
Frustrated
Freedom
Confident
Show
Willingness
More quotes by Eric Hoffer
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
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.
Eric Hoffer
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Eric Hoffer
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.
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
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
Eric Hoffer
Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.
Eric Hoffer
When you automate an industry you modernize it when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Eric Hoffer
The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.
Eric Hoffer
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Eric Hoffer
Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were the people, and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.
Eric Hoffer
The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches.
Eric Hoffer
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
Eric Hoffer
Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
Eric Hoffer
Good and evil grow up together and are bound in an equilibrium that cannot be sundered. The most we can do is try to tilt the equilibrium toward the good.
Eric Hoffer
EVERY intense desire is perhaps basically a desire to be different from what we are.
Eric Hoffer
Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
Eric Hoffer
Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.
Eric Hoffer
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
