One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
ERIC HOFFERIt is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
More Eric Hoffer Quotes
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The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.
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The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.
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Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
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The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.
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Nothing comes easily. My work smells of sweat.
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It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.
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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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To learn you need a certain degree of confidence, not too much and not too little. If you have too little confidence, you will think you can’t learn. If you have too much, you will think you don’t have to learn.
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The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.
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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
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To change everything, simply change your attitude.
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Children are the keys of paradise.
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The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.
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It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.
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It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
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Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
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When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.
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Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
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It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
ERIC HOFFER -
We see through others only when we see through ourselves.
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Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
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A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
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Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
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Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
ERIC HOFFER