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Richard Weaver

107 quotes

“Rhetoric in its truest sense seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A hundred years ago—or even a couple of generations ago—you do not encounter the sort of waving of the bloody shirt of prejudice that greets you on all sides now. Men did not profess such indignation that other men had differing convictions and viewpoints. They rather expected to encounter these, and to argue with them as best they could.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The modern Communist, looking upon this world with its interesting distinctions and its prolific rewards and pleasures, may be compared to Satan peering into the Garden.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those who are guilty of the argumentum ad ignorantiam profess belief in something because its opposite cannot be proved … In the realm where “prejudice” is now most an issue, it normally takes a form like this: you cannot prove—by the method of statistics and quantitative measurement—that men are not equal. Therefore all men are equal. … You cannot prove—again by the methods of science—that one culture is higher than another. Therefore the culture of the Digger Indians is just a good as that of Muncie, Indiana, or thirteenth-century France.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment, he [Hibben] pointed out, but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment. … First, there are those judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory. … The second type of unreasoned judgments we hold is the opinions we adopt from others … The third class of judgments in Professor Hibben’s list comprises those which have subconscious origin. The material that furnishes their support does not reach the focal point of consciousness, but psychology insists upon its existence.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man of frank and strong prejudices, far from being a political and social menace and an obstacle in the path of progress, is often a benign character and helpful citizen. The chance is far greater, furthermore, that he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions, or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality. There is such a thing as being so broad you are flat.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. For prejudices, as we have seen earlier, are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conservative realizes that many orthodox positions, once abandoned in panic because they were thought to be indefensible, are quite defensible in only one gives a little thought to basic issues. Surely one of these positions is the right of an individual or society to hold a belief which, though unreasoned, is uncontradicted.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are some despotic governments so filled with a feeling of insecurity that they regard the free life of culture as a threat to their existence. … On the other extreme is the kind of popular government which is so distrustful of all forms of distinction that it sees even in the cultivated individual a menace to its existence. Such states are likely to maintain a pressure which discourages cultural endeavor, although the pressure may be exerted through social channels.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aristocratic mind … is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two Types of American Individualism,” The Modern Age, Spring 1963, p. 127.
“One of the first major steps in the direction of modern skepticism came through the victory of Occam over Aquinas in a controversy about language. The statement that modi essendi were replaced by modi significandi et intelligendi, or that ontological referents were abandoned in favor of pragmatic significations, describes broadly the change in philosophy which continues to our time. From Occam to Bacon, from Bacon to Hobbes, and from Hobbes to contemporary semanticists, the progression is clear: ideas become psychological figments, words become useful signs.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In recognizing that words have the 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 evaluation.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a sentimental poetry, and it will have to be exposed (not censored. certainly; for to omit criticism of it would deprive us of our fairest chance to combat the sentimental rhetoric of the student’s environment).”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In dialectic the student … will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to R. T. Eubanks, January 19, 1961, p. 56.
“Man … feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: “This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we share to a large extent in the mutuality of spirit which makes meaning possible, we are receptive to true meanings; if we do not, we may accept wrong or perverted ones. And since there is no way of getting outside the human imagination to decide otherwise what a word should mean, we are compelled to realize that the most imaginative users of language are those who are going to have the greatest influence upon vocabulary in the long run.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword “scientific objectivity” and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.”
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. 72.
“From the viewpoint of my general purpose, I had come to believe that one way to achieve the education which leads to understanding and compassion is to take some period of the past and to immerse oneself in it so thoroughly that one could think its thoughts and speak its language. The object would be to take this chapter of vanished experience and learn to know it in three if not four dimensions. That would mean coming to understand why certain actions which in the light of retrospect appear madly irrational appeared at that time the indisputable mandate of reason; why things which had been created with pain and care were cast quickly on the gaming table of war; why men who had sat in the senate chamber and debated with syllogism and enthymeme stepped out of it to buckle on the sword against one another. Almost any book of history will give you the form of such a time, but what will give you the pressure of it? That is what I particularly wished to discover.”
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), pp. 24, col. 2-25, col. 1.
“I am now further convinced that there is something to be said in general for studying the history of a lost cause. Perhaps our education would be more humane in result if everyone were required to gain an intimate acquaintance with some coherent ideal that failed in the effort to maintain itself. It need not be a cause which was settled by war; there are causes in the social, political, and ecclesiastical worlds which would serve very well. But it is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the “progress” of history through the eyes of those who were left behind. I cannot think of a better way to counteract the stultifying “Whig” theory of history, with its bland assumption that every cause which has won has deserved to win, a kind of pragmatic debasement of the older providential theory. The study and appreciation of a lost cause have some effect of turning history into philosophy. In sufficient number of cases to make us humble, we discover good points in the cause which time has erased, just as one often learns more from the slain hero of a tragedy than from some brassy Fortinbras who comes in at the end to announce the victory and proclaim the future disposition of affairs. It would be perverse to say that this is so of every historical defeat, but there is enough analogy to make it a sober consideration. Not only Oxford, therefore, but every university ought to be to some extent“the home of lost causes and impossible loyalties.” It ought to preserve the memory of these with a certain discriminating measure of honor, trying to keep alive what was good in them and opposing the pragmatic verdict of the world.”
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, cols. 1-2.
“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have confined ourselves thus far to the kind of obsession which results from attention to peripheral matter and to specialization of labor, but there is another way in which science and its metaphysical handmaiden, progress, discourage sanity. This is its exaltation of "becoming" over "being." The domination of becoming produces another sort of fragmentation, which may be called “presentism.” Allen Tate has made the point that many modern people to whom the word “provincial” is anathema are themselves provincials in time to an extreme degree. Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as a countryman may view with suspicion whatever lies beyond his country.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. … An opposite conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around. When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that work is something apportioned out by men leaves people discontent with their portion and dubious about whether work is a good thing at all. … The ancient injunction to labor fades when we regard our work as cut out for us by men, who, by present dogma, are no better than ourselves. That curious modern hypostatization “service” is often called in to substitute for the now incomprehensible doctrine of vocation. It tries to secure subordination by hypothesizing something larger than the self, which turns out, however, to be only a multitude of selfish selves. The familiar change from quality to quantity may again be noted; one serves not the higher part of the self (this entails hierarchy) … but merely consumer demand. And who admires those at the top of a hierarchy of consumption? Man as a consuming animal is thus seen to be not enough.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern man … when he looks at his daily newspaper … sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted discipline of astrology.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations. This does more of the average man’s thinking for him than he suspects. For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases. These 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. … Journalism becomes a monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charms by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without which one is not a thinking man.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We face the fact that our side has been in retreat for four hundred years without, however, having been entirely driven from the field. One corner is yet left. When we survey the scene to find something which the rancorous leveling wind of utilitarianism has not brought down, we discover one institution, shaken somewhat, but still strong and perfectly clear in its implications. This is the right of private property, which is, in fact, the last metaphysical right remaining to us. The ordinances of religion, the prerogatives of sex and of vocation, all have been swept away by materialism, but the relationship of a man to his own has until the present largely escaped attack. The metaphysical right of religion went out at the time of the Reformation. Others have been gradually eroded by the rising rule of appetite. ... Its survival may be an accident, yet it ... is the sole thing left among us to illustrate what right, independent of service or utility, means. We say the right of private property is metaphysical because it does not depend on any test of social usefulness. Property rests upon the idea of the hisness of his: proprietas, Eigentum, the very words assert an identification of owner and owned. Now the great value of this is that the fact of something's being private property removes it from the area of contention. In the hisness of property we have dogma; there discussion ends. ... It is a self-justifying right, which until lately was not called upon to show in the forum how its “ services" warranted its continuance in a state dedicated to collective well-being. At this point I would make abundantly clear that the last metaphysical right offers nothing in defense of that kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism. Such property is, on the contrary, a violation of the very notion of proprietas. This amendment of the institution to suit the uses of commerce and technology has done more to threaten property than anything else yet conceived. For the abstract property of stocks and bonds, the legal ownership of enterprises never seen, actually destroy the connection between man and his substance without which metaphysical right becomes meaningless. Property in this sense becomes a fiction useful for exploitation and makes impossible the sanctification of work.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends. The educational institutions of the United States afford a striking demonstration of this truth. Virtually without exception, liberal education, that is to say, education centered about ideas and ideals, has fared best in those institutions which draw their income from private sources. They have been able … to insist that education be not entirely a means for breadwinning. This means that they have been relatively free to promote pure knowledge and the training of the mind. … In state institutions, always at the mercy of elected bodies and of the public generally, and under obligation to show practical fruits for their expenditure of money, the movement toward specialism and vocationalism has been irresistible. They have never been able to say that they will do what they will with their own because their own is not private. It seems fair to say that the opposite of the private is the prostitute.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For modern man there is no providence, because it would imply a wisdom superior to his and a relationship of means to ends which he cannot find out. Instead of feeling grateful that some things are past his discovering..., he is vexed and promises himself that one day the last arcanum will be forced to yield its secret. His pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. The physical world IS a complex of imposed conditions; when these thwart im- mediate expressions of his will, he becomes angry and asserts that there should be no obstruction of his wishes. In effect this becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eulogy of the non-lover in the speech of Lysias … stresses the fact that the non-lover … does not commit extreme acts under the influence of passions. Since he acts from calculation, he never has occasion for remorse. … The non-lover demonstrates his superiority through prudence and objectivity. … We must now observe how these points of superiority correspond to those of “semantically purified” speech, … the kind of speech approaching pure notation in the respect that it communicates abstract intelligence without impulsion. It is a simple instrumentality, showing no affection for the object of its symbolizing and incapable of inducing bias in the hearer. In its ideal conception, it would have less power to move than 2 + 2 = 4, since it is generally admitted that mathematical equations may have the beauty of elegance, and hence are not above suspicion where beauty is suspect. But this neuter language will be an unqualified medium of transmission of meanings from mind to mind, and by virtue of it minds can remain in an unprejudiced relationship to the world and also to other minds. … Instead of passion, it offers the serviceability of objectivity … It distrusts any departure from the literal and prosaic.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Communist … chooses some feature of an order where there is a potential resentment, or he may choose some feature about which people are simply soft-headed—that is to say, confused or uncertain. It may be the existence of rich men; it may be the right to acquire and use property privately; it may be the idea of discipline and regard in education; it may be some system of preferential advancement which produces envy in the less successful. His most common maneuver … is to vilify this as founded upon “prejudice.” The burden of his argument usually is that since these do not have perfectly rationalized bases, they have no right to exist.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is … a good deal of empirical evidence for saying that rationalistic men are more intolerant than “prejudiced” men. The former take the position that their judgments are reasoned conclusions, and why should one swerve or deflect from what can be proved to all reasonable men? Such are often the authors of persecutions, massacres, and liquidations. The man who frankly confesses to his prejudices is usually more human and more humane. He adjusts amicably to the idea of his limitations. A limitation once admitted is a kind of monition not to try acting like something superhuman. The person who admits his prejudices, which is to say, his unreasoned judgments, has perspective on himself. … When H. L. Mencken wrote his brilliant series of essays on men, life, and letters, he gave them a title as illuminating as it was honest—Prejudices. What he meant … was that these were views based on such part of experience as had passed under his observation. There was no apology because some figures were praised and others were roundly damned, and there was no canting claim to “objectivity.” Mencken knew that life and action turn largely on convictions which rest upon imperfect inductions, or sampling of evidence, and he knew that feeling is often a positive factor.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man. This is good evidence that Johnson had achieved what I referred to as perspective, which carries with it a necessary humility. And while some may be startled to hear Mencken called a modest man, I can infer nothing but a real condor and humility from those bombastic and ironical allusions to himself which comprise much of the humor of his writings. The tone he adopted was a rhetorical instrument; he had faced his limitations.”
Richard Weaver (1910–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source