Richard M. Weaver Quotes (110 quotes, page 2)

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.
“Life without prejudice,” p. 10.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Life , Men , Feeling , Idea

“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 M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” pp. 8-9.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Support , Memory

“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

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 25.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Reality

“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 M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 68.

Life , Truth , Way , Idea

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

Richard M. Weaver

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

Feeling

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

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 19.

“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 M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 73-74.

Age , Way , Effort , Time

“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 M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 26.

World , Feeling , Tear , Effort

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain , People , Feeling , Nature

“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

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Past

“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 M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 37.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

World , Personality

“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

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

World , School , Way , Business

“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

“Relativism and the Use of Language,” p. 121.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Understanding

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

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 56.

Parting

“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

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 49.

Education , Wealth

“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 M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 6.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men , Science

“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

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

Understanding

“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.””

Richard M. Weaver

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.
"Up from Liberalism” Modern Age Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1958-1959), p. 25, cols. 1-2.

War , World , Education , Way

“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 M. Weaver

"Up from Liberalism” Modern Age Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1958-1959), p. 25, col. 2.

War , People , Way , History

“Neuter discourse is a false idol.”

Richard M. Weaver

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

Falseness

“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

“Life without prejudice,” p. 12.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)