Lessons

Yet, the painful lessons we would like to forget are precisely the ones which should be kept for reference.  Santayana has reminded us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and not without reason did Plato declare that a philosopher much have a good memory.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Men at Work

An employer was recently heard to remark that we have plenty of persons today who can tell us why a machine will not work but none will tell us why men will not work.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Spoiled Child and Consumption

The spoiled child is simply one who has been allowed to believe that his consumptive faculty can prescribe the order of society.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

What the World Owes

If cities encourage man to believe that he is superior to the limitations of nature, science encourages him to believe that he is exempt from labor.  In effect, what modern man is being told is that the world owes him a living.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

The 1960s

I can just see, having done arbitration in the industrial scene, that the employers will love this generation, that they are not going to press very many grievances, there won't be much trouble, they are going to do their jobs, they are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be riots. There aren't going to be revolutions. There aren't going to be many strikes.

Source: Clark Kerr, Spotlight on the college student, 1959
Taken From: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997 pg169

Egotism

All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or the body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life.  Such individuals are made acutely conscious of self, by the torture in which it dwells.  Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by.

Source: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent, 1843
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Entitlement

Demagogic leaders have told the common man that he is entitled to much more than he is getting; they have not told him the less pleasant truth that, unless there is to be expropriation ... the increase must come out of greater productivity.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

On Thinking about General Actions

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Source:  Alfred Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics, 1911
Taken From:  Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society

On Origins

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin... will obtain the clearest view of them.

Source: Aristotle (Politics: 24–25)
Taken From: Daniel J. D’Amico, The Prison in Economics: Private and Public Incarceration in Ancient Greece (PDF)

Threat to the Spoiled

[The castigation of profitable, hard workers] looks alarmingly like a dull hatred of every form of personal superiority.  The spoiled children perceive correctly that the superior person is certain, sooner or later, to demand superior things of them, and this interferes with consumption and, above all, with thoughtlessness.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Starvation

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

Source: Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Ch11 1936
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Sacredness

It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some resource of sacredness.  Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

More On DDT

A Ugandan Health Minister said in 2002 that, “Our people’s lives are of primary importance. The West is concerned about the environment because we share it with them. But it is not concerned about malaria because it is not a problem there. In Europe, they used DDT to kill anopheles mosquitoes that cause malaria. Why can’t we use DDT to kill the enemy in our camp?”

Source: Paul Driessen, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. (Merril Press: 2004), page 73
Taken From: New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship: The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom, Part3

On DDT (Stops Malaria)

Michael Crichton, an author and PhD molecular biologist, plainly stated, “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”

Source: Paul Driessen, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. (Merril Press: 2004), page 73
Taken From: New Eugenics and the Rise of the Global Scientific Dictatorship: The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom, Part3

A Reminder for this Member of Bourgeois

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.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Spirit of Reverence

Let parents, then, bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence

Source:  Plato, Laws Book V
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Whatever Happened to Voluntary Military Service?

The attempt of the United States to make military service attractive by offering high pay, free college education, and other benefits looks suspiciously like bribing the child with candy.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

On Time Preference

[The] point here is that no society is healthful which tells its members to take no thought of the morrow because the state underwrites their future.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Justice

There is bitterness in the thought that there may be no hell; for ... if there is no hell, there is no justice.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Realism, War and Justice

There is an unforgettable scene in Lincoln Steffens' Autobiography which tells of a proposal made by Clemenceau at the Versailles Peace Conference.  The astute Frenchman, having listened to much talk that this was a war to end war forever, asked Wilson, Lloyd George, and Orlando whether they were taking the idea seriously.  After obtaining assent from each of the somewhat nonplussed heads of state, Clemenceau proceeded to add up before them the cost.  The British would have to give up their colonial system; the Americans would have to get out of the Philippines, to keep their hands off Mexico; and on and on it went.  Clemenceau's colleagues soon made it plain that this was not at all what they had in mind, whereupon the French realist bluntly told them that they wanted not peace but war.  Such is the position of all who urge justice but really want, and actually choose, other things.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Natures Infinite Book of Secrecy

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
a little I can read.

Source:  Shakespeare's Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene II 1603-1607
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Pluralism and the Majority

The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself.  In its eyes pluralism is treason.  Once you credit man with the power of reason and with inviolable rights, you set bounds beyond which the will of majorities may not go.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Obliterating Merit

But self-pampering, present-minded modern man looks neither before nor after; he marks inequalities of condition and, forbidden by his dogmas to admit inequalities of merit, moves to obliterate them.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Knowledge and the Word

To discover what a thing is "called" according to some system is the essential step in knowing, and to say that all education is learning to name rightly, as Adam named the animals, would assert an underlying truth.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Religion, Progress and Time Preference

In the ages of faith, the final end of life is placed beyond life.  The men of those ages, therefore, naturally and almost involuntarily accustom themselves to fix their gaze for many years on some immovable object toward which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them ..... This explains why religious nations have often achieved such lasting results; for whilst they were thinking only of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this.

Source:  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, V2 Ch2 Section XVII, 1840
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Commentary on the Spoiled Child Psychology of the "masses"

He has been given the notion that progress is automatic, and hence he is not prepared to understand impediments; and the right to pursue happiness he has not unnaturally translated into a right to have happiness, like a right to the franchise.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Spoiled Child

The spoiled child has not been made to see the relationship between effort and reward.  He wants things, but he regards payment as an imposition or as an expression of malice by those who withhold for it.  His solution, as we shall see, is to abuse those who do not gratify him.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

The Hardest Victory

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

Source: Aristotle, may be a variant of "He who has overcome his fears will truly be free."
Taken From: Casey Research, 2011-08

Newspapers

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier

Source: Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to John Adams, 1812 (unsourced)
Taken From: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

Religion and Education

... 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.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

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Definitions: 
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:

1. "What is there?"
2. "What is it [...] like?"