Quote

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.

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
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Induce
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Seriousness

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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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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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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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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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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.
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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 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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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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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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Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.
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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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