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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
Assumption
Consideration
Avoid
Majors
Major
Considerations
Responsibility
Utterance
Language
Chief
Something
Chiefs

More quotes by 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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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.
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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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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Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
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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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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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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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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Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
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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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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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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The typical modern has the look of the hunted.
Richard M. Weaver
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Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
Richard M. Weaver
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The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.
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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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.
Richard M. Weaver