Richard Hofstadter Quotes
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.
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.
Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
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.
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.
To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.
As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
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.
The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
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.
It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.
To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.
To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.
"The tradition of the new." Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury....
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.
