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

- Richard Hofstadter

If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the para…

- Richard Hofstadter

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the pow…

- Richard Hofstadter

The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men wit…

- Richard Hofstadter

The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of sign…

- Richard Hofstadter

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to s…

- Richard Hofstadter

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.

- Richard Hofstadter

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but …

- Richard Hofstadter

Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege.

- Richard Hofstadter