Richard M. Weaver
Nature is not something to be fought, conquered and changed according to any human whims. To some extent, of course, it has to be used. But what man should seek in regard to nature is not a complete domination but a modus vivendi - that is, a manner of living together, a coming to terms with something that was here before our time and will be here after it. The important corollary of this doctrine, it seems to me, is that man is not the lord of creation, with an omnipotent will, but a part of creation, with limitations, who ought to observe a decent humility in the face of the inscrutable.Collection: Humility
It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Past
The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners; the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Mean
No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.Collection: Healthy
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.Collection: Divinity
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.Collection: Independent
Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.Collection: War
The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: War
In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Community
The hero can never be a relativist.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Strong
Ideas have consequences.Collection: Ideas
The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Way
[The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.Collection: War
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.Collection: Height
The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: School
Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments. At the same time that man attempts to straighten a crooked nature, he is striving to annihilate space, which seems but another phase of the war against substance. We ignore the fact that space and matter are shock absorbers; the more we diminish them the more we reduce our privacy and security.Collection: War
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.Collection: Zest
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.Collection: Country
When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .Collection: Philosophy
Progress never defines its ultimate objective but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series,' Mr. [John Crowe] Ransom said' 'Industrialism,' he declared, 'is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning, but no intelligence; it needs to be strongly governed, or it will destroy the economy of the household. Only a community of tough conservative habit can master it.Collection: Community
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.Collection: Decay
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.Collection: Taken
The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Democracy
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.Collection: Plato
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Believe
contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Overcoming
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.Collection: Men