Not only does the intellectual's penchant for tutoring, directing, and regulating promote a regimented social pattern, but his craving for the momentous is bound to foster an austere seriousness inhospitable to the full play of freedom.

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Source, in full

Ch. 12: "Concerning Individual Freedom" [In this passage "transforms the prosaic achievements of society into Promethean tasks, glorious defeats, tragic epics" is a quotation of Raymond Aron from The Opium of the Intellectuals (1957), p. xiv]

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Hoffer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.