Richard Hofstadter · 560 pages
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“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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“A smart man understood that victory was not inevitable. An even smarter man knew that defeat was never really total if you figured out how to handle the aftermath with skill and just the right spin.
And the smartest men of all, even when they lost, they actually won.”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Whole Truth
“As long as you want me, i'm yours.”
― Kahlen Aymes, quote from The Future of Our Past
“the only thing that's permanent is destruction
we're all going to disappear
trying to leave a mark more permanent that myself.”
― Sarah Kane, quote from 4.48 Psychosis
“How can U say one style is better than another. You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you"ve given up something. ... I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. - Andy Warhol, 1963”
― Legs McNeil, quote from Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
“The self-prepared dinner is a great time killer for lonely people and as much time should be spent on it as possible.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Shopgirl
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