Dreams and Logic

It must be apparent that logic depends upon the dream, and not the dream upon it.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Free and Equal

An American political writer of the last century, confronted with the statement that all men are created free and equal, asked whether it would not be more accurate to say that no man was ever created free and no two men ever created equal.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Life's Racecourse

Life's racecourse is fixed ... Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once

Source: Cicero, Unsourced
Taken From: Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997

Of the Ox and the Lion

It is generally assumed that the erasing of all distinctions will usher in the reign of pure democracy.  But the inability of pure democracy to stand for something intelligible leaves it merely a verbal deception.  If it promises equality before the law, it does no more than empires and monarchies have done and cannot use this as a ground to assert superiority.  If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and the lion is tyranny.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948 

On the Fall of Education

... it is precisely because we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge that we have nothing to educate with for the salvation of our order. Americans certainly cannot be reproached for failing to invest adequately in the hope that education would prove a redemption.  They have built numberless high schools, lavish in equipment, only to see them, under the prevailing scheme of values, turned into social centers and institutions for improving the personality, where teachers, living in fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship.  They have built colleges on an equal scale, only to see them turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism, and professionalism.  Finally, they have seen pragmatists, as if in peculiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.

Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Organization

The politicians and the 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.

 Source: Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences 1948