Richard Hofstadter Short Quotes

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

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

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

Richard Hofstadter
The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.

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

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

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

Richard Hofstadter
The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.

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

Richard Hofstadter
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
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
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
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