The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation.

— Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter Quotes

The role of third parties is to sting like a bee, then die.

— Richard Hofstadter

We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- “the tradition of the new.” Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today’s chic and tomorrows cliche.

— Richard Hofstadter

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption.

— Richard Hofstadter

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury...

— Richard Hofstadter

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

— Richard Hofstadter

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 values in him...

— Richard Hofstadter

There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies.

— Richard Hofstadter

As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.

— Richard Hofstadter

A large segment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments.

— Richard Hofstadter

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

— Richard Hofstadter

However, in a populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.

— Richard Hofstadter

The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast and in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame.

— Richard Hofstadter

The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilisation.

— Richard Hofstadter

As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

— Richard Hofstadter

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

Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there.

— Richard Hofstadter

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind. Studies.

— Richard Hofstadter

The truly creative mind is hardly ever so much alone as when it is trying to be sociable. The.

— Richard Hofstadter

Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men.

— Richard Hofstadter

Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.

— Richard Hofstadter
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