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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.

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
Human
Price
Humans
Fully
Excellences
Without
Claims
Consummated
Needs
Paid
Fatally
Kind
Understood
Complement
High
Claim
Rather
Excellence
Cannot
Intellect

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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.
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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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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.
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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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The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.
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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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It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
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Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
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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.
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Intellect is neither practical nor impractical it is extra-practical.
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