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Richard Weaver citations
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Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr est un universitaire américain qui a enseigné l'anglais à l'université. Il est connu pour son approche conservatrice et formelle de la rhétorique moderne.

Solitaire, devenu brièvement socialiste dans sa jeunesse, il devint conservateur lors de ses hautes études. Professeur d'écriture, Weaver est profondément influencé par la philosophie de Platon à propos des universaux. Weaver critique le nominalisme mais prône une critique littéraire et culturelle, dans une approche philosophique de la nature humaine et de la société. Young le décrit comme un « penseur original et radical », aspects qui ressortent dans son ouvrage Ideas Have Consequences et The Ethics of Rhetoric. Ces travaux ont influencé les théoriciens conservateurs ainsi que les universitaires du sud des États-Unis. Weaver fut également associé au mouvement des « New Conservatives » , un groupe d'universitaires qui ont prônés le conservatisme traditionnel dans les années 40 et 50. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. mars 1910 – 1. avril 1963
Richard Weaver: 110   citations 0   J'aime

Richard Weaver: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 72.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 77.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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

“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.””

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Richard M. Weaver

“Relativism and the Use of Language,” p. 123.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 23.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 24.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 13.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 51.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Education and the individual,” p. 43.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

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

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Richard M. Weaver

“Education and the individual,” p. 42.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 54.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 96-97.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 23.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 183.

“If one benighted class of men begins by assuming that whatever is, is right, [contemporary radicals] begin by assuming that whatever is, is wrong. Had we to decide between these two—and I hope I make it clear that I do not think we have to decide thus—the latter would appear more blasphemous than the former because it makes a wholesale condemnation of a creation which is not ours and which exhibits the marks of a creative power that we do not begin to possess. The intent of the radical to defy all substance, or to press it into forms conceived in his mind alone … is an aggression by the self which outrages a deep-laid order of things.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Up From Liberalism,” p. 142.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 67.

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

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 21.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

“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”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 160.

“In his effort toward revivification of this sense [the sense for great art], the modern artist has not infrequently retired into himself; he has accepted isolation or even alienation. … Sometimes the good has to go underground. … The “revolutionary” artist … has had the aim of saving himself from the surrounding forces of sentimentality and vulgarity. … It is impossible to make a deal with these forces, and we should not be surprised if in striking back the artist has done so in ways even intended to be offensive. He has sometimes shown defiance and contempt toward those who would deny his level of seriousness.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” pp. 30-31.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.””

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 141.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 66.

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

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Richard M. Weaver

“Two Types of American Individualism,” The Modern Age, Spring 1963, p. 127.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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

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

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 176.

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 11-12.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 60.

“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.””

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Richard M. Weaver

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)

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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

“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.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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