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
“Balance the world in your relationship. No one person should be responsible for killing ALL the Zombies.”
― Jesse Petersen, quote from Married with Zombies
“I know what pheromones are! But that’s
mumbo jumbo. You’re just horny, I’m just
horny. It’s not science.”
― Lauren Dane, quote from Enforcer
“There Laura spent many happy hours, supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a Samson tree and walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her 'green study'.”
― Flora Thompson, quote from Lark Rise to Candleford
“Lucas’s position was supine: that is, whenever he heard people arguing about it, he wanted to lie down and take a nap.”
― John Sandford, quote from Buried Prey
“Though Kurt would later claim that his graffiti messages were political, in fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting “Boat Ack” in red letters on the ship’s hull; on the other side he lettered, “Boat people go home.”
― Charles R. Cross, quote from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
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