Richard Weaver

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

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

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

Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and –consuming animal.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

… contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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 the 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 guaranty against external control, which is self-discipline, taught and practiced.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole tendency of empiricism and democracy in speech, dress and manners has been toward a plainness which is without symbolic significance. The power of symbolism is greatly feared by those who wish to expel from life all that is nonrational in the sense of being nonutilitarian

— Richard Weaver

The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.

— Richard Weaver

For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his 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

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

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

The complete man, then, is the “lover” added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

Neuter discourse is a false idol.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

The aristocratic mind … is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.

— Richard Weaver

Man … feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.

— Richard Weaver

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

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

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

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

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