Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
ERIC HOFFERWhat monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.
More Eric Hoffer Quotes
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One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
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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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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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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.
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Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
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Rudeness is the weak man’s limitation of strength.
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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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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 quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
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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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Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
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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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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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To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
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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