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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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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Avoid
Majors
Major
Considerations
Responsibility
Utterance
Language
Chief
Something
Chiefs
Assumption
Consideration

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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.
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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.
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When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
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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.
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Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ideas have consequences.
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 complete man, then, is the lover added to the scientist the rhetorician to the dialectician.
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We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
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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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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 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.
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The hero can never be a relativist.
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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Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver