Ideas Have Consequences Quotes

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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, Ideas Have Consequences

“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, Ideas Have Consequences

“The hero can never be a relativist.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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, Ideas Have Consequences

“Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“No society is healthy which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The typical modern has the look of the hunted.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline of toil”
― Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“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.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Reason alone fails to justify itself. Not without cause has the devil been called the prince of lawyers, and not by accident are Shakespeare’s villains good reasoners.”
― Smith III, Ted J., Ideas Have Consequences

“As man becomes more immersed in time and material gratifications, belief in the continuum of race fades, and not all the tinkering of sociologists can put homes together again.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Personality in its true definition is theomorphic. Individuality, on the other hand, may be mere eccentricity or perverseness. Individualism, with its connotation of irresponsibility, is a direct invitation to selfishness, and all that this treatise has censured can be traced in some way to individualist mentality. But personality is that little private area of selfhood in which the person is at once conscious of his relationship to the transcendental and the living community. He is a particular vessel, but he carries some part of the universal mind. Once again it happens that when we seek to define “the final worth of the individual,” as a modern phrase has it, we find that we can reverence the spirit in man but not the spirit of man. The latter supposition was the fallacy of literary humanism. There is piety in the belief that personality, like the earth we tread on, is something given us. It”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“It is said that physicians sometimes ask patients, “Do you really wish to get well?” And, to be perfectly realistic in this matter, we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive. One can detect signs of suicidal impulse; one feels at times that the modern world is calling for madder music and for stronger wine, is craving some delirium which will take it completely away from reality. One is made to think of Kierkegaard’s figure of spectators in the theater, who applaud the announcement and repeated announcement that the building is on fire. I”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“Awareness of the past is an antidote to both egotism and shallow optimism. It restrains optimism because it teaches us to be cautious about man’s perfectibility and to put a sober estimate on schemes to renovate the species. What coursebook in vanity and ambition is to be compared with Plutarch’s Lives? What more soundly rebukes the theory of automatic progress than the measured tread of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall? The reader of history is chastened, and, as he closes his book, he may say, with Dante, in the Inferno: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Among”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“The community of language gives one access to significances at which he cannot otherwise arrive. To find a word is to find a meaning; to create a word is to find a single term for a meaning partially distributed in other words. Whoever may doubt that language has this power to evoke should try the experiment of thinking without words. It”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“The claim to political equality was then supplemented by the demand for economic democracy, which was to give substance to the ideal of the levelers. Nothing but a despotism could enforce anything so unrealistic, and this explains why modern governments dedicated to this program have become, under one guise and another, despotic.”
― Smith III, Ted J., Ideas Have Consequences

“In brief, the discipline of poetry may be expected first to teach the evocative power of words, to introduce the student, if we may so put it, to the mighty power of symbolism, and then to show him that there are ways of feeling about things which are not provincial either in space or time.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The politicians and businessmen are not interested in saving souls, but they are interested in preserving a minimum of organization, for upon that depend their posts and their incomes. These leaders adopted the liberal's solution to their problem. That was to let religion go but to replace it with education, which supposedly would exercise the same efficacy. The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“For it is true historically that those who have shown the greatest subtlety with language have shown the greatest power to understand (this does not exclude Sophists, for Plato made the point that one must be able to see the truth accurately in order to judge one’s distance from it if he is practicing deception). To take a contemporary example which has statistical support: American universities have found that with few exceptions students who display the greatest mastery of words, as evidenced by vocabulary tests and exercises in writing, make the best scholastic records regardless of the department of study they enter. For physics, for chemistry, for engineering—it matters not how superficially unrelated to language the branch of study may be—command of language will prognosticate aptitude. Facility with words bespeaks a capacity to learn relations and grasp concepts; it is a means of access to the complex reality. Evidently”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“there is meaning in the one popular ballad to come out of World War II. “Roger Young” has the line, “O we’ve got no time for glory in the infantry.” The language of business was increasingly applied to war, as when “soldier” and “sailor” were displaced by the neuter “servicemen.” To say “Our boy is in service” instead of “Our son is fighting for his native land” pretty well empties out the heroic strain. The”
― Ted j. Smith III, Ideas Have Consequences

“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetites. Those who remember alone have a sense of relatedness, but whoever has a sense of relatedness is in at least the first grade of philosophy. Henry Ford’s statement that history is bunk is a perfectly proper observation for a bourgeois industrialist, and it was followed with equal propriety by another: “Creeds must go.” Technology emancipates not only from memory but also from faith. What humane spirit,”
― Smith III, Ted J., Ideas Have Consequences

“One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today.”
― Smith III, Ted J., Ideas Have Consequences

“Our task is much like finding the relationship between faith and reason for an age that does not know the meaning of faith.”
― Smith III, Ted J., Ideas Have Consequences