Quote

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.

Richard M. Weaver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Greater
Emancipation
Understanding
Rhetoric
Impulse
Action
Scientific
Together
Perception
Whole
Duty
Bring
Since
Clarification

More quotes by Richard M. Weaver

Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is not that things give meaning to words it is that meaning makes things things. It does not make things in their subsistence but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
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.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
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.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
The hero can never be a relativist.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The South is the region that history has happened to.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
Richard M. Weaver
Image
Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard M. Weaver
Image
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
Image
The prevailing attitude towards nature is that form of heresy which denies substance and, in doing so, denies the rightfulness of creation. We have said - to the point of repletion, perhaps - that man is not to take his patterns from nature but neither is he to waste himself in seeking to change her face.
Richard M. Weaver