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. — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
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… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
“purity of a sort is easily had where responsibilities are not assumed. The” — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one. — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
“The truly creative mind is hardly ever so much alone as when it is trying to be sociable. The” — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
“They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do. — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption. — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
The intellectual's ... playfulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dangerous. And neither quality is considered… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share
“...the danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values… — Richard Hofstadter Copy Share Image
