Richard M. Weaver > Quotes

“Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.”
― Richard M. Weaver, 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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The hero can never be a relativist.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The typical modern has the look of the hunted.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards…”
― Richard M. Weaver

“Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, (the middle class') aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The politicians and businessmen are not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in preserving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes. These leaders adopted the liberal's solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Gentlemen did not always live up to their ideal, but the existence of an ideal is a matter of supreme importance.”
― Richard M. Weaver

“In brief, 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, Ideas Have Consequences

“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, as witness the attack of Jacobins upon crowns, cassocks, and flags.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“traditional society was organized around king and priest, soldier and poet, peasant and artisan. Now distinctions of vocation fade out, and the new organization, if such it may be termed, is to be around capacities to consume. Underlying the shift is the theory of romanticism; if we attach more significance to feeling than to thinking, we shall soon, by a simple extension, attach more to wanting than to deserving. Even”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Some form of sentiment, deriving from our orientation toward the world, lies at the base of all congeniality. Vanishing, it leaves cities and nations mere empirical communities, which are but people living together in one place, without friendship or common understanding, and without capacity, when the test comes, to pull together for survival.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Europe, after the agony of the first World War, turned to the opposite type for leadership, to gangsters, who, though they are often good entrepreneurs, are without codes and without inhibitions.1 Such leaders in Europe have given us a preview of what the collapse of values and the reign of specialization will produce.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“By the attention it gives their misdeeds it makes criminals heroic and politicians larger than life.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the radio. Together they present a version of life quite as controlled as that taught by medieval religionists, though feeble in moral inspiration, as we shall see. It is now our object to look at the effects of each in turn.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Foremost was the impulse of revolt against conventions and institutions.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Europe long ago began the expenditure of its great inheritance of medieval forms, so that Burke, in the late eighteenth century, was sharply aware that the “unbought grace of life” was disappearing.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“If we examine Lee first upon the art at which he surpassed, we find a curiously dispassionate understanding not just of the technique, but of the place of war in the life of civilized man. Napoleon too was a philosopher of battle, but his utterances are marred by cynicism. Those of Lee have always the saving grace of affirmation. Let us mount with the general the heights above Fredericksburg and hear from him one of the most searching observations ever made. It is contained in a brief remark, so innocent-seeming, yet so disturbing, expressed as he gazed upon the field of slain on that December day. "It is well this is terrible; otherwise we should grow fond of it."

What is the meaning? It is richer than a Delphic saying. Here is a poignant confession of mankind’s historic ambivalence toward the institution of war, its moral revulsion against the immense destructiveness, accompanied by a fascination with the “greatest of all games.” As long as people relish the idea of domination, there will be those who love this game. It is fatuous to say, as is being said now, that all men want peace. Men want peace part of the time, and part of the time they want war. Or, if we may shift to the single individual, part of him wants peace and another part wants war, and it is upon the resolution of this inner struggle that our prospect of general peace depends, as MacArthur so wisely observed upon the decks of the Missouri. The cliches of modern thought have virtually obscured this commonplace of human psychology, and world peace programs take into account everything but this tragic flaw in the natural man—the temptation to appeal to physical superiority. There is no political structure which knaves cannot defeat, and subtle analyses of the psyche may prove of more avail than schemes for world parliament. In contrast with the empty formulations of propagandists, Lee’s saying suggests the concrete wisdom of a parable.”
― Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver

“the symphonic form was repellent to Moussorgsky because its first-movement predominance signified to him aristocratic domination.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences