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Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
Eric Hoffer
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Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
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Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
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I have never felt that I had a thought too profound for others to understand. On the contrary, it always seemed to me axiomatic that what was clear to me should be clear and easy to everyone else. This despite the fact that it often took me years to grope my way to an idea.... I can spend days and even months on a single sentence. I do not know how to skip. To think and write with me is like putting brick on brick.
Eric Hoffer
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The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion — it is an evil government.
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In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern
Eric Hoffer
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It is apparently vital that we should be in the dark about ourselves — not to be clear about our intentions, fears, and hopes. There is a stubborn effort in us to set up a compact screen between consciousness and the self.
Eric Hoffer
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They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.
Eric Hoffer
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The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.
Eric Hoffer
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Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.
Eric Hoffer
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The sense of worth derived from creative work depends upon "recognition" by others, which is never automatic. As a result, the path of self-realization, even when it is the only open one, is taken with reluctance. Men of talent have to be goaded to engage in creative work. The groans and laments of even the most gifted and prolific echo through the ages.
Eric Hoffer
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There is no alienation that a little power will not cure.
Eric Hoffer
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The attitude of the intellectual community toward America is shaped not by the creative few but by the many who for one reason or another cannot transmute their dissatisfaction into a creative impulse, and cannot acquire a sense of uniqueness and of growth by developing and expressing their capacities and talents. There is nothing in contemporary America that can cure or alleviate their chronic frustration. They want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action. Even if we should banish poverty from the land, lift up the Negro to true equality, withdraw from Vietnam, and give half of the national income as foreign aid, they will still see America as an air-conditioned nightmare unfit for them to live in.
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Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
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We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Eric Hoffer
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It is the Frenchman's readiness to exaggerate that is at the root of his intellectual lucidity and also of his capacity for acknowledging merit. The English were not afraid to exaggerate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were then not far behind the French in the lucidity of their thinking.... There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation in expression.
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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
Eric Hoffer
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We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.
Eric Hoffer
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The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
Eric Hoffer
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The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
Eric Hoffer
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Even in slight things, the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.
Eric Hoffer
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To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.
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We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
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The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.
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Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.
Eric Hoffer
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Eric Hoffer
Born:
July 25, 1898
Died:
May 21, 1983
(aged 84)
Bio:
Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983.
Known for:
The Ordeal of Change (1963)
The Passionate State of Mind (1955)
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)
The temper of our time (1967)
Most used words:
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power
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faith
time
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