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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

Eric Hoffer

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.
ERIC HOFFER

Frustration Greatness Oneself Philosophy Satisfaction Wisdom
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Betrayal Help People
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

Build Creation Image Learning Man Nature Perfection Technology
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
ERIC HOFFER

Children Leadership Transformation
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
ERIC HOFFER

Age Busy Learning Ourselves Teaching Time Young
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
ERIC HOFFER

Cure Privacy Sick Trouble
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question.
ERIC HOFFER

Action Age Human Invention Language Man Talk
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
ERIC HOFFER

Choice Deep Freedom Philosophy
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.
ERIC HOFFER

Angel Hate Human Man Nature Savior
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.
ERIC HOFFER

Business Character Man Mindset People Worth
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
ERIC HOFFER

Corruption Faith Power
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
ERIC HOFFER

Be Yourself Different Improvement Philosophy Transformation Wisdom
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.
ERIC HOFFER

Confidence Learning Need Thinking Yourself
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Deep Faith Lost Wisdom
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.
ERIC HOFFER

Country Government High Intellectual Power Production
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

Death Judgement Kind Kindness Motive Ourselves

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

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The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.

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Popular Authors

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