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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.
Eric Hoffer -
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
Eric Hoffer
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
Eric Hoffer -
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Eric Hoffer -
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
Eric Hoffer -
What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?
Eric Hoffer -
Children are the keys of paradise.
Eric Hoffer -
The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.
Eric Hoffer
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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 -
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
Eric Hoffer -
Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
Eric Hoffer -
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Eric Hoffer -
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Eric Hoffer -
There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.
Eric Hoffer
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Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.
Eric Hoffer -
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
Eric Hoffer -
The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
Eric Hoffer -
A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
Eric Hoffer -
When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.
Eric Hoffer -
It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
Eric Hoffer
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A man by himself is in bad company.
Eric Hoffer -
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
Eric Hoffer -
Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.
Eric Hoffer -
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
Eric Hoffer