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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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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Tell
Popular
Particulars
Power
Average
Imagines
Doe
Trust
Industrious
Many
Told
Render
Great
Imagine
Acquisition
Things
Small
Pathetic
Men
Knowledge
Arena
Facts
Consists
Recite

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Richard M. Weaver
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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
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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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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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The complete man, then, is the lover added to the scientist the rhetorician to the dialectician.
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
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Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver
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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
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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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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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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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Neuter discourse is a false idol.
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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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.
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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Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
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