Richard Hofstadter Quotes

#1. 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

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

Richard Hofstadter

#3. Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.

Richard Hofstadter

#4. 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

#5. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.

Richard Hofstadter

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

Richard Hofstadter

#9. 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

#10. The danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that hardly troubles us.

Richard Hofstadter

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.

Richard Hofstadter

#14. 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

#15. To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.

Richard Hofstadter

#16. It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

Richard Hofstadter

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

Richard Hofstadter

#18. 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

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

Richard Hofstadter

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

Richard Hofstadter

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury ...

Richard Hofstadter

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Get action, do things; be sane," he once raved, "don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.

Richard Hofstadter