Skip to content

The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.

— Richard Hofstadter The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R (1955)

Another quote →

More quotes by Richard Hofstadter

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

Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic.

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

All Richard Hofstadter quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Hofstadter (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.