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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

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

More quotes by 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 typical modern has the look of the hunted.
Richard M. Weaver
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The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.
Richard M. Weaver
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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
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The hero can never be a relativist.
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 complete man, then, is the lover added to the scientist the rhetorician to the dialectician.
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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Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
Richard M. Weaver
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Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver
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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.
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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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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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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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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
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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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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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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
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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