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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

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Richard Hofstadter
Age: 54 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 6
Died: 1970
Died: October 24
Historian
University Teacher
Buffalo
New York
Many
Substitutes
Every
Interpretation
Error
Points
Substitution
Fascinating
Incompetence
Errors
Treason
Imagination
Paranoid
Open
Substitute

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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.
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As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
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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.
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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.
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To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.
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The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.
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It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
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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.
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