Richard Hofstadter Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.

Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter

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:

Richard Hofstadter on Wikipedia

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