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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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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Culture
Pressing
Past
Barbarians
Find
Bourgeois
Whole
Appetite
Men
Relevant
Finds
Connection
Connections
Barbarian

More quotes by 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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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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Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.
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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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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[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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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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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 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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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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Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
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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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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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
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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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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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The hero can never be a relativist.
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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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