A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
ERIC HOFFERThe basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
More Eric Hoffer Quotes
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Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
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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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It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
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Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.
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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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Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
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The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
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Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.
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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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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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We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
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The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
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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.
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It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.
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It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.
ERIC HOFFER