Quotes by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter

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.

Failure

Men

Political

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.

Being Free

Character

Criticism

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

Catholicism

Pornography

Puritan

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.

Degrees

Gowns

Hemlock

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.

Intellectual

Twenties

Years

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

Pursuit Of Happiness

Truth

Turns

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.

Errors

Imagination

Incompetence

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.

Commitment

Education

Independent

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.

Adults

Children

Play

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

Extras

Intellect

Practicals

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Adults

Age

Avant Garde

Beast

Bees

Being Free

Catholicism

Character

Children

Class

Commitment

Compassion

Criticism

Degrees

Delicate Things

Doubters

Education

Errors

Essence

Europe

Evil

Excellence

Expression

Extras

Failure

Fantasy

Fashion

Fate

Form

Gowns

Has Beens

Hatred

Hazards

Heart

Hemlock

Honesty

Ideas

Ideology

Imagination

Incompetence

Independent

Intellect

Intellectual

Kind

Land

Luxury

Lying

Mean

Men

Moral Absolutism

The Future Blueprint

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Quotes by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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