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Richard Weaver

107 quotes

“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 Weaver (1910–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 66.
“For my part, I spent three years reading the history and literature of the Civil War, with special attention to that of the losing side. The people who emerged were human, all-too-human, but there was still the mystery of the encompassing passion which held them together, and this I have not yet penetrated. But in a dozen various ways I came to recognize myself in the past, which is at least an important piece of self-knowledge.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Up from Liberalism” Modern Age Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1958-1959), p. 25, col. 2.
“In the popular arena, one can tell … that the average man … imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. Charles Péguy has referred to modern man’s feeling of “slow economic strangulation,” his sense of never having enough to meet the requirement which his pattern of life imposes on him. Standards of consumption which he cannot meet, and which he does not need to meet, come virtually in the guise of duties.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. … If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on every side today. … What he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being … then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The average man of the present age … does not want to be a sentimentalist in his endeavors; he wants some measure for purposeful activity; he wants to feel that through the world some increasing purpose runs. … But since his metaphysic calls only for magnitude and number, since it is becoming without a goal, it is not a source of distinctions in value. It is a system of quantitative comparison. Its effect therefore has been to collapse the traditional hierarchy and to produce economic man, whose destiny is mere activity.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[C]ontempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since liberalism has become a kind of official party line, we have been enjoined against saying things about races, religions or national groups, for after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not define, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display “sensibility toward the cultural expressions of all lands and peoples.” This is a process of emasculation.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The theory of empiricism is plausible because it assumes that accuracy about small matters prepares the way for valid judgment about large ones. What happens, however, is that the judgments are never made. The pedantic empiricist, buried in his little province of phenomena, imagines that fidelity to it exempts him from concern with larger aspects of reality.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. … As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. … The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Greek fable, as in Christian, it is asserted that there is a forbidden knowledge which brings nothing into world but woe. Our generation has had ample demonstration of what that knowledge is. It is knowledge of the useful rather than the true and the good, of techniques rather than of ends.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. … The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance, and now labor betrays it by embracing a scheme of things which sees profit only, not duty and honor, in work. This view will seem hopelessly unrealistic to those who do not admit that sentiment toward the whole is the only ultimate means of measuring value.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of the effort of modern politicians is devoted to convincing us that men serve best when they are serving one another. But the one consideration which would make this true is left out; service to others is the best service when the effort of all is subsumed under a transcendental conception. Material gratification does not provide this.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When masses of men reach a point at which egotism reigns so blandly, can their political damnation be far off? They have rejected their only guarantee against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and practiced.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plato was disturbed by written discourse because … if an individual goes to it with a question in his mind, it “always gives one unvarying answer.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … Phrases … are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection, but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In former times, when the honor of work had some hold upon us, it was the practice of a maker to give his name to the product … But, as finance capitalism grew and men and property separated, a significant change occurred in names: the new designations shed all connection with the individual and become “General,” “Standard,” “International,” “American.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant of evaluation.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others’ experiences.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The complete man, then, is the “lover” added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Neuter discourse is a false idol.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source