Richard Hofstadter

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.

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 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.

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.

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.