Hofstadter The Paranoid Quotes & Sayings

We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay.[p. 82] — Mary Catherine Bateson

Olivia married sexy Ghandi. No wonder she loves her husband. — Tarryn Fisher

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

Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life ...
Sasha: In life it's the same.
Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life! — Anton Chekhov

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

Layers like a bad Van Gogh. Pella felt little beads — Chad Harbach

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

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

I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things. — Patti Smith

Nothing is so rash as fear; its counsels very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate the evils from which it would fly. — Edmund Burke

Violence of any kind, once it starts, is like fucking a gorilla-you ain't done till
the gorilla's done. — Craig Ferguson

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

I am a Christian resident of New York City. I simply read things the other Manhattanites read (NY Times, New Yorker magazine, Wall Street Journal, and many of the books they read) plus all my Christian reading. I don't do anything special to understand skeptics. I also talk to a lot of skeptics and read things they point to. — Timothy Keller