Richard Weaver Quotes

1910–1963 United States

Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr (March 3, 1910—April 1, 1963) was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid-20th-century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric.

United States
Academics
Anti-communists
Conservatives
Educators

Also known as: R. M. Weaver, Richard M. Weaver, Ideas have Consequences

Random Richard Weaver quote

74 quotes

He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

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

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Nothing is more certain than that whatever has to court public favor for its support will sooner or later be prostituted to utilitarian ends.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Rhetoric in its truest sense seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain extending up toward the ideal.

The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

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.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.

Language is Sermonic (1970)

In the hisness of property we have dogma; there discussion ends.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

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

The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.

Life Without Prejudice (1965)

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.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

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.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.

Language is Sermonic (1970)

In dialectic the student … will get training in thinking, whereas the best that he gets now is a vague admonition to think for himself.

Language is Sermonic (1970)

We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.

Language is Sermonic (1970)

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.

Life Without Prejudice (1965)

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.

The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)

Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

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

Language is Sermonic (1970)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Weaver (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.