15 Posts found for Author: Richard Hofstadter

The principles of Christian morality [have] always characterized its creed but too rarely its behavior.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion

The fundamentalist mind… is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion

Studies of political intolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that zealous churchgoing and rigid religious faith are among the important correlates of political and ethnic animosity.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Religion

The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness and masculinity.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Religion, for many individuals or groups, may be an expression of serene belief, personal peace, and charity of mind. But for more militant spirits it may also be a source or an outlet for animosities.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion

Business in America at its highest levels appealed not merely to greed and the lust for power but to the imagination; alluring to the builder, the gamester, and the ruler in men, it offered more sport than hunting and more power than politics.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Business, International

Intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry

In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Education | Scholarship, International, Thought | Inquiry

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.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry

Modern students of social mobility have made it incontestably clear that the legendary American rags-to-riches story, despite the spectacular instances that adorn our business annals, was more important as a myth and a symbol than as a statistical actuality.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Business, International

As business became the dominant motif in American life and as a vast material empire rose in the New World, business increasingly looked for legitimation in a purely material and internal criterion—the wealth it produced. American business, once defended on the ground that it produced a high standard of culture, was now defended mainly on the ground that it produced a high standard of living. … [ Read more ]

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Business, History

In the main, America took its stand with utility, with improvement and invention, money and comfort. It was clearly understood that the advance of the machine was destroying old inertias, discomforts, and brutalities, but it was not so commonly understood that the machine was creating new discomforts and brutalities, undermining traditions and ideals, sentiments and loyalties, esthetic sensitivities.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society

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

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy