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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Nothing so successfully discourages slovenliness in the use of language as the practice of translation. Focusing upon what a word means and then finding its just equivalent in another language compels one to look and to think before he commits himself to any expression. It is a discipline of exactness”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“This part of his study should include, too, the foreign languages, and, if we really intend business, this will mean Latin and Greek.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“And it is entirely certain that if we leave them to the sort of education obtainable today from extra-scholastic sources, the great majority will be schooled in the two vices of sentimentality and brutality. Now great poetry, rightly interpreted, is the surest antidote to both of these. In contrast with journalists and others, the great poets relate the events of history to a pure or noble metaphysical dream, which our students will have all their lives as a protecting arch over their system of values. Of course, a great deal will depend on the character and quality of the instruction.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“that the people of the Western world “do not know the meaning of certain words, which had been assumed to belong to the permanent vocabulary of mankind, certain ideals which, if ignored in practice under pressure, were accepted in theory. The least important of these words is Freedom. The most important are Justice, Mercy, and Truth.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“Or consider the number of contradictory things which have been denominated Fascist. What has happened to the one world of meaning? It has been lost for want of definers. Teachers of the present order have not enough courage to be definers; lawmakers have not enough insight.”
― Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences