Quotes from Richard M. Weaver

The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.

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.

Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.

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.

contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

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.

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.

The hero can never be a relativist.

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

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.

There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization. On the contrary, absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.

The typical modern has the look of the hunted.

There was a time when the elder generation was cherished because it represented the past; now it is avoided and thrust out of sight for the same reason.

I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.

Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.

Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards…

Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, (the middle class') aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite.

Out of the surfeit of falsity born of technology and commercialism, we rejoice in returning to primary data and to assurance that the world is a world of enduring forms which in themselves are neither brutal nor sentimental.

A creature designed to look before and after finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming impossible.