Richard Hofstadter · 560 pages
Rating: (1.5K votes)
“It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“Get action, do things; be sane,” he once raved, “don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“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 in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“[Grover} Cleveland, this product of good conscience and self-help, with his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, was a taxpayer's dream, the ideal bourgeois statesmen for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price. He was the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it.”
― Richard Hofstadter, quote from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“Chip Robbins, how many times have I told you not to yell out for me unless you're being stabbed with a pitchfork?”
― J.D. Robb, quote from New York to Dallas
“Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?”
― David Markson, quote from Wittgenstein's Mistress
“it’s this reminder that no matter who you are, there will always be someone prettier or smarter or thinner. Perfection is nothing more than a phantom shadow we’re all chasing.”
― Julie Murphy, quote from Dumplin'
“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-read heath,
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers "Death".”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Hollow
“Man is an angry, savage being. Sometimes faith becomes an excuse for battle. It is no real faith then. In justifying their positions in the name of God, men silence God.”
― C.J. Sansom, quote from Dark Fire
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