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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

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Richard Hofstadter
Age: 54 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 6
Died: 1970
Died: October 24
Historian
University Teacher
Buffalo
New York
Future
Onward
Strong
Robust
Seems
Uncertain
Much
Beast
Slouch
Like
Wounds
Succumb
Nation
Ailments
Huge
Inarticulate
Nations
Resourceful

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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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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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Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.
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The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.
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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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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.
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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 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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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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It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
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