Richard M. Weaver: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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 M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 36.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Idea , Change , Time , Victory

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

Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 4.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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 M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 52.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Chance

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

Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 53.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Hope

“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 M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” pp. 52-53.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Way , Feeling , Time

“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 M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 55.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Thinking , Training

“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

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 150.

“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 M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 23.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

Education

“The young come to us creatures of imagination and strong affection; they want to feel, but they don’t know how—that is to say, they do not know the right objects and the right measures. And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today for extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values.”

Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 51.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Education , School , Dreams , Feeling

“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

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

Life , Indifference

“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

“Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric,” p. 93.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Faith

“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

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 55.

Country

“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 M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 5.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men , People , Education , Idea

“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 M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

Knowledge

“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

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 53.

Understanding

“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 M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life , World , Question , Support

“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.””

Richard M. Weaver

This is a process of emasculation.
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 59.

Men , People , Religion

“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 M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 11.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Fear

“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 M. Weaver

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” p. 139.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Feeling , Literature , Science , Change

“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

“The Power of the Word,” p. 54.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

World , Communication