Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter Quotes
35 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
Richard Hofstadter
Source
Report...
The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
Richard Hofstadter
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.
Richard Hofstadter
1
2
Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Richard Hofstadter
Wikipedia
Born:
August 6, 1916
Died:
October 24, 1970
(aged 54)
Bio:
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University.
Known for:
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963)
The Age of Reform (1955)
Social Darwinism in American thought (1944)
Most used words:
intellectual
paranoid
play
mind
political
politics
practical
ideas
intellectualism
life
piety
anti
business
united
states
Richard Hofstadter on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Richard Hofstadter Quotes
Richard Hofstadter Short Quotes
American Historian Quotes
Historian Quotes
20th-century Historian Quotes
Related People
C. Vann Woodward
American Historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
American Social critic
Christopher Lasch
American Historian
Susan Jacoby
American Journalist
Eric Foner
American Historian
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes