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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.

Richard M. Weaver

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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Kind
Ancient
Occupy
Mind
Willing
Rulers
Illiberal
Men
Small
Classical
Specialization
Belief
Endeavor
Freeman
Lost
Consideration
Considerations
Back
Larger
Ruler
Must
Considered
Antiquity
Going
Details
Bury

More quotes by Richard M. Weaver

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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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The typical modern has the look of the hunted.
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Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
Richard M. Weaver
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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
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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
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We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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The complete man, then, is the lover added to the scientist the rhetorician to the dialectician.
Richard M. Weaver
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Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.
Richard M. Weaver
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Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.
Richard M. Weaver
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We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.
Richard M. Weaver
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Ideas have consequences.
Richard M. Weaver
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In the popular arena, one can tell ... that the average man ... imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.
Richard M. Weaver
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[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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
Richard M. Weaver