Top 62 Richard M. Weaver Quotes
#1. Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it ... The very though seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.
Richard M. Weaver
#2. In the countries of Europe, one after another, the gentleman has been ousted by politicians and entrepreneurs, as materialism has given rewards to the sort of cunning incompatible with any kind of idealism.
Richard M. Weaver
#3. There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.
Richard M. Weaver
#4. [I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.
Richard M. Weaver
#5. Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost.
Richard M. Weaver
#6. Contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.
Richard M. Weaver
#7. We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Richard M. Weaver
#8. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver
#9. Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
Richard M. Weaver
#10. The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.
Richard M. Weaver
#11. The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
Richard M. Weaver
#12. Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil ... Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.
Richard M. Weaver
#13. Until the world perceives that "good" cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and "bad" because it is another's, there is no prospect of realizing community.
Richard M. Weaver
#14. The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.
Richard M. Weaver
#15. No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.
Richard M. Weaver
#16. No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.
Richard M. Weaver
#17. Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.
Richard M. Weaver
#18. Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.
Richard M. Weaver
#19. When you're on the wrong road, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who goes backwards first. As long as there are such people, hope lies in our future.
Richard M. Weaver
#20. Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these. Nothing short of a recovery of the ancient virtue of pietas can absolve man from this sin.
Richard M. Weaver
#21. Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.
Richard M. Weaver
#22. Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.
Richard M. Weaver
#23. Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
Richard M. Weaver
#24. The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.
Richard M. Weaver
#25. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
Richard M. Weaver
#26. The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
Richard M. Weaver
#27. One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.
Richard M. Weaver
#28. [The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.
Richard M. Weaver
#29. The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.
Richard M. Weaver
#30. Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice ... Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, ... or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.
Richard M. Weaver
#31. Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.
Richard M. Weaver
#32. The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.
Richard M. Weaver
#35. Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.
Richard M. Weaver
#36. The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.
Richard M. Weaver
#37. Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
Richard M. Weaver
#38. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of man.
Richard M. Weaver
#40. It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
Richard M. Weaver
#41. In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.
Richard M. Weaver
#42. Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.
Richard M. Weaver
#44. Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.
Richard M. Weaver
#45. The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good.
Richard M. Weaver
#46. The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.
Richard M. Weaver
#47. We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.
Richard M. Weaver
#48. We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.
Richard M. Weaver
#49. The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.
Richard M. Weaver
#50. Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.
Richard M. Weaver
#51. The modern position seems only another manifestation of egotism, which develops when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the rights to existence of things not of his own contriving.
Richard M. Weaver
#52. It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.
Richard M. Weaver
#53. It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.
Richard M. Weaver
#55. When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
Richard M. Weaver
#56. Chivalry - ... a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct. Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman.
Richard M. Weaver
#57. It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
Richard M. Weaver
#58. Now, with the general decay of religious faith , it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.
Richard M. Weaver
#59. Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.
Richard M. Weaver
#60. Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.
Richard M. Weaver
#61. It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.
Richard M. Weaver
#62. The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.
Richard M. Weaver
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