Richard Hofstadter Quotes

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

- Richard Hofstadter

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

- Richard Hofstadter

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

- Richard Hofstadter