Top 92 Hofstadter's Quotes
#1. It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Douglas Hofstadter
#2. Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#3. In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.
Douglas Hofstadter
#5. It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#7. This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#8. what happens on the lower level is responsible for what happens on the higher level, it is nonetheless irrelevant to the higher level. The higher level can blithely ignore the processes on the lower level.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#10. Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#11. The Nobel Prize is given as a personal award but it also honors the field of research in which I have worked and it also honors my students and colleagues.
Robert Hofstadter
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.
Richard Hofstadter
#16. 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
#17. Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.
Douglas Hofstadter
#18. The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
Richard Hofstadter
#19. I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#20. It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.
Douglas Hofstadter
#21. It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.
Richard Hofstadter
#22. No reference is truly direct - every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.
Douglas Hofstadter
#23. To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.
Richard Hofstadter
#24. We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#25. Saying that studying the brain is limited to the study of physical entities would be like saying that literary criticism must focus on paper and bookbinding, ink and its chemistry, page sizes and margin widths, typefaces and paragraph lengths, and so forth.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#28. The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.
Douglas 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
#32. 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
#33. The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.
Douglas Hofstadter
#34. The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.
Douglas Hofstadter
#35. For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).
Douglas Hofstadter
#36. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over ... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
Douglas Hofstadter
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#42. We all have heard it claimed that 13 is an 'unlucky number.' Indeed, there are many hotels in America that for this very reason claim not to have a 13th floor, in the sense that there is no button bearing the label '13' in their elevators (I recently stayed in one in New York, in fact).
Douglas Hofstadter
#43. Not only has this subject been long associated with the ideas of thinking men over the ages but its practical importance is attested to by the huge resources of men and material thrown into this type of work.
Robert Hofstadter
#44. It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#45. To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury ...
Richard Hofstadter
#46. Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#47. 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
#48. Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
Marvin Minsky
#49. 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
#50. I enjoy acronyms. Recursive Acronyms Crablike "RACRECIR" Especially Create Infinite Regress
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#51. 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
#52. There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#53. The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers' rigidity.
Douglas Hofstadter
#54. There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.
Douglas Hofstadter
#55. Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?
Douglas Hofstadter
#56. Despite the Cooper/Hofstadter papers on the subject,
Jodi Taylor
#58. Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
Douglas Hofstadter
#59. It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.
Douglas Hofstadter
#60. I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
Douglas Hofstadter
#61. Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.
Douglas Hofstadter
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
Douglas Hofstadter
#66. We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#67. Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
Richard Hofstadter
#68. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
Richard Hofstadter
#69. You can never represent yourself totally ... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.
Douglas Hofstadter
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.
Douglas Hofstadter
#73. A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions - it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.
Douglas Hofstadter
#74. Supperational thinkers, by recursive definition, include in their calculations the fact that they are in a group of superrational thinkers.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#75. Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.
Douglas Hofstadter
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#79. A term meant to convey a person's inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#80. 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
#81. One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.
Douglas Hofstadter
#82. It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done ...
Douglas Hofstadter
#84. Eli Hofstadter, Private Detective and Investigative services. I find
Callie Hart
#85. 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
#87. You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.
Douglas Hofstadter
#88. 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
#89. Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#91. Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.
Richard Hofstadter
#92. If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is.
Andrew Plotkin
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