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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.

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
Ideas
Essence
Grotesque
Live
Intellectual
Intellectuals
Must
Becoming
Breed
Something
Idea
Obsessive
Living
Defects
Zealotry
Stills
Prevent
Zealots
Still
Although
Zealot
May
Regard
Defect

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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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Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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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.
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The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.
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Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
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Intellect is neither practical nor impractical it is extra-practical.
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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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The tradition of the new. Yesterday's avant-gard-experiment is today's chic and tomorrow's cliche.
Richard Hofstadter