“We can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and… we run fastest and farthest from ourselves.”

Section 37, Ch.6 Misfits
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

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Eric Hoffer240

American philosopher 1898–1983

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“When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.”

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Context: In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have.

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Cassandra (1860)
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Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“We can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and… we run fastest and farthest from ourselves.”

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