A Maniac, You Say?

Veteran CBS newsman Eric Sevareid said his hour-long interview with Eric Hoffer was “the greatest filmed monologue I had ever had anything to do with in all my years in television.” Sevareid was the CBS Washington bureau chief from 1946 to 1954 and covered every presidential election from 1948 to 1976, alongside Murrow and Cronkite, so that’s saying something.

Eric Hoffer was a self-educated longshoreman who wrote ten books, became an adjunct professor at UC Berkley and was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. Asked  how his own epitaph might read, Hoffer replied “He wrote a few good sentences.” Here’s one:

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”