The Age of Reform Quotes

“What came in the end was only a small war and a quick victory; when the farmers and the gentlemen finally did coalesce in politics, they produced only the genial reforms of Progressivism; and the man on the white horse turned out to be just a graduate of the Harvard boxing squad, equipped with an immense bag of platitudes, and quite willing to play the democratic game.”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform

“Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform

“It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform

“Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there.”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform

“Progressivism, in short, was to a very considerable extent led by men who suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power.”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.d.r.

“the product of a freed people that have not the spirit to be free.… We”
― Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.d.r.