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
Richard Hofstadter
Born place: in Buffalo, New York, The United States
Born date August 6, 1916
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“The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents”
― Jeanette Winterson, quote from The Stone Gods
“This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs
“Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“We’re killing lots of dinosaurs though. The trains are helping.”
“The TRAINS are—“
“Only one derailed so far,” Urruah said cheerfully.”
― Diane Duane, quote from The Book of Night with Moon
“N-am smuls noi, oare, navigând laolaltă pe marea nemuritoare, un sens vieților noastre păcătoase? Adio, fraților! Ați fost niște mateloți destoinici. La fel de destoinici ca oricare dintre cei care-au izbit vreodată, urlând, în pânzele zbuciumate ale arborelui mare; sau care, legănându-se pe vergi, invizibili în noapte, au răspuns chiuind la chiotele furtunii.”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Nigger of the Narcissus
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