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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

Eric Hoffer

It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.
ERIC HOFFER

Compassionate Justice Man Principle Protection
It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
ERIC HOFFER

Difference Doubt Fight Freedom Oppression Power Pride
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
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life.
ERIC HOFFER

Life Live Obsession Passionate World
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
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Betrayal Help People
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
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
ERIC HOFFER

Empty Hate Life Passionate Purpose
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
ERIC HOFFER

Children Leadership Transformation
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
ERIC HOFFER

Difficult Empty Force Wisdom
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
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.
ERIC HOFFER

End Goodness Military Rise
The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.
ERIC HOFFER

Betrayal Deal Hard Selfish Stupidity
There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its leastworthy members.
ERIC HOFFER

Judgement Nation Nature People
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.
ERIC HOFFER

Build Empty Evil Greatness Hard Hide Ourselves Philosophy Pretend Ugly
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.
ERIC HOFFER

Doctor Humanity Room Sick Soul World

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

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To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.

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