Richard Hofstadter Quotes

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search

Who hears wrong, replies wrong.

It’s very difficult to come to grips with how we screwed this up, but we screwed this up.

It is a strange thing in human life, that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, sympathetic, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal from the cause, but because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against which treason was so easy

There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps. One hopes they won’t be fatal.

The problem is never the populist’s imperfect capacity to represent the people’s will; rather, it’s always the institutions that somehow produced the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society.

Quite often, I have a compelling sense of how a role should be played. And I'm proved - equally as often - quite wrong.

I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'

And I laugh at myself when I screw things up, which happens all the time.

Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.

I can do with mistakes, but I can't deal with stupidity.

I made mistakes in every trial.

Of all the things we are wrong about, error might well top the list ... We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends. And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.

Mistakes, mistakes, it's all I seem capable of at times.

When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

Statesman only talk of fate when they have blundered

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.