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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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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Capacity
Approach
Conditions
Amoral
Shall
Degraded
Means
Descent
Without
Perceive
Mean
Condition
Measure

More quotes by 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 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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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
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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 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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When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
Richard M. Weaver
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Neuter discourse is a false idol.
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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Richard M. Weaver