Top 40 Richard Hofstadter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”

— Richard Hofstadter

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

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

— Richard Hofstadter

7. “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

8. “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

9. “To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.”

— Richard Hofstadter

10. “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

11. “The truly creative mind is hardly ever so much alone as when it is trying to be sociable. The.”

— Richard Hofstadter

12. “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

13. “The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.”

— Richard Hofstadter

14. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.”

— Richard Hofstadter

15. “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

16. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

17. “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

18. “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

— Richard Hofstadter

19. “To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.”

— Richard Hofstadter

20. “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation.”

— Richard Hofstadter

21. “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

22. “If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.”

— Richard Hofstadter

23. “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

24. “However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

— Richard Hofstadter

25. “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

26. “Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men.”

— Richard Hofstadter

27. “Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”

— Richard Hofstadter

28. “To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury...”

— Richard Hofstadter

29. “It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.”

— Richard Hofstadter

30. “Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.”

— Richard Hofstadter

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

— Richard Hofstadter

32. “Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there.”

— Richard Hofstadter

33. “There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies.”

— Richard Hofstadter

34. “As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.”

— Richard Hofstadter

35. “The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast and in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame.”

— Richard Hofstadter

36. “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

37. “Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.”

— Richard Hofstadter

38. “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

39. “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

40. “We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- “the tradition of the new.” Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today’s chic and tomorrows cliche.”

— Richard Hofstadter

41. “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

42. “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

43. “It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.”

— Richard Hofstadter

44. “Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.”

— Richard Hofstadter