Richard M. Weaver Quotes

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.

When you're on the wrong road, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who goes backwards first. As long as there are such people, hope lies in our future.

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.

Chivalry - ...a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct. Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman.

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.

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.

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.

Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

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

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.

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of man.

The hero can never be a relativist.

The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.

Ideas have consequences.

The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.

We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

Neuter discourse is a false idol.

Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost.

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

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.

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.

The South is the region that history has happened to.

The typical modern has the look of the hunted.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

...knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.

Now, with the general decay of religious faith , it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.

Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.

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

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

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

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.

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

No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.