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The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer

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.
ERIC HOFFER

Ability Achievement Country Education Important Live People Production Satisfaction
Far more critical than what we know or what we don’t know is what we don’t want to know.
ERIC HOFFER

Philosophy Yourself
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
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
Rudeness is the weak man’s limitation of strength.
ERIC HOFFER

Limitation Man Rude Strength Weakness
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
ERIC HOFFER

Deep Faith Lost Wisdom
Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.
ERIC HOFFER

Adult Listening Serious Young
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
ERIC HOFFER

Cure Privacy Sick Trouble
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
Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.
ERIC HOFFER

Country Education Nation Present
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
ERIC HOFFER

Corruption Deep Power Weakness
The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor’s shortcomings as he is of his own.
ERIC HOFFER

Ability Capacity Ourselves Respect Tolerance
You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
ERIC HOFFER

Enough Happiness Need Philosophy Wisdom Yourself
To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
ERIC HOFFER

Alive Feeling Inspirational Possible
Take man’s most fantastic invention- God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.
ERIC HOFFER

Atheist God Image Imitation Invention Man
There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
ERIC HOFFER

Doubt Humility Life Practice Selfish Worth

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

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The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

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