Hofstadter, Richard

US historian

wrote histories "Social Darwinism in American Thought" 1944, "The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It" 1948, "The Age of Reform" 1955 (Pulitzer Prize for history 1956), "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" 1963 (Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction 1964), "The Structure of American History" 1964, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" 1965, "The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington" 1968, "The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840" 1969, "America at 1750: A Social Portrait" 1971, "People and a Nation" 1971

• "A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind."
• "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."
• "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."
• "If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea."