Hofstadter Paranoid Quotes & Sayings

To be busy is man's only happiness. — Mark Twain

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 by his fantasies as well. — Richard Hofstadter

I know, darling. Your body speaks to me in ways your mouth would never agree to confessing. — Sai Marie Johnson

All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child. — Joan Didion

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 paranoid imagination. — Richard Hofstadter

As the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger — Dennis McKenna

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. — Richard Hofstadter

The thing about this band is that every member of the band is a song-writer so that takes some of the pressure off. — Joey Jordison

It's amazing that no matter how much money you have, you can make some bad decisions, and in five months you're on the street, begging. — Paz De La Huerta

The old series of sittings with Mrs. Piper convinced me of survival for reasons which I should find it hard to formulate in any strict fashion, but that was their distinct effect. — Oliver Joseph Lodge

It is one thing to read scandalous verse, quite another to disguise it behind lofty pretension. — Maggie Fenton

There is a great deal of nonsense written on the subject of diversity and multiculturalism, but the fact remains that the great challenge facing our world is that of maintaining clear convictions and strong commitments while living in peaceful proximity with people with different convictions and commitments, avoiding brittle bigotry on the one hand and soggy relativism on the other. — Maria Poggi Johnson

Hofstadter shows how the political psychology of paranoid politics works: (1) posit, as Senator Joseph McCarthy did, "a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man"; (2) declare its infiltration of the government to be massive and pernicious; and (3) insist that time is running out, and without immediate action their takeover will be complete. Paranoid politics is thus a psychological disposition - projecting one's problem onto the fiendish machinations of others, so as both to uphold one's own purity and goodness and simultaneously to identify the source of the problem. As with many projects that rely on psychological displacement, the groups often produce the very thing they most fear; they become the enemy they are seeking to destroy: — Michael S. Kimmel

Any historian of warfare knows that it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, we can see how many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination: treason in high places can be found at almost every turning
and in the end the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position, but how it has managed to survive at all. — Richard Hofstadter

Contrast that with the call of the Liberal Democrats in April, when they were prepared to call upon the British people to participate in a 24-hour strike. It shows how far to the right the Labour Party's gone. — Arthur Scargill