Richard Hofstadter famous quotes

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Character #Criticism #Inquiry

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Failure #Men #Political

Anti-Catholicism has always been the ***** of the Puritan.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Puritan #Pornography #Catholicism

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Practice #Political #Absolutism

The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Europe #Land #Class

The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Strong #Too Much #Beast

The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Past #Class #Age

Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Excellence #Needs #Kind

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Struggle #Class #Hatred

It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him...
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Intellectual #Tragedy #Values

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual "in a situation he has not known for a generation." After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it "the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Years #Intellectual #Generations

Anti-intellectualism ... has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Hemlock #Gowns #Towns

It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Lying #Class #Intellectual

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Essence #Ideas #Intellectual

Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Lying #Intellectual #Quests

In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Children #Play #Adults

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Intellect #Practicals #Extras

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Lying #Skills #Ideas

The intellectual's ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practical business of life.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Men #Play #Luxury

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Privilege #Form #Intellect

The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Fashion #Yesterday #Today

As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Truth #Pursuit Of Happiness #Turns

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Education #Independent #Commitment

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Honesty #Successful #People

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Heart #Want #Reason

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury....
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Simple #Luxury #Evil

If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Errors #Imagination #Incompetence

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Character #Evil #Imagination

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Men #Expression #Ideas

The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Party #Roles #Bees

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Fate #Ideology

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Real #World #Fantasy

To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Class #Uprising #Criticism

Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Mean #Doubters #Sole

The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Ideas #Intellectual #Signals

We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- "the tradition of the new." Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today's chic and tomorrows cliche.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Yesterday #Today #Novelty

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Self #Sick #Narcissistic

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
-- Richard Hofstadter

#Political #Intellectual #Ironic