Quotes by Richard Weaver

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.

Man is a mixture of good and evil, and he can never be perfected in this life. The notion of his natural goodness is a delusive theory which will blow up any social order that is predicated upon it.

People who give up their own land too readily need careful weighing, exactly as do those who are so with their convictions. Even Solomon said that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. One gives up the part for the whole only to discover that without parts there is no whole.

'Progress never defines its ultimate objective but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series,' Mr. [John Crowe] Ransom said' 'Industrialism,' he declared, 'is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning, but no intelligence; it needs to be strongly governed, or it will destroy the economy of the household. Only a community of tough conservative habit can master it.

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life.

The Southerner tends to look upon nature as something which is given and something which is finally inscrutable. This is equivalent to saying that he looks upon it as the creation of a Creator.

The United States lost more men from battle wounds and disease in the Civil War than in any other war of its history, including the Second World War. The battle front stretched from Pennsylvania to New Mexico, and included also the seven seas.

Today the South is faced with fresh assaults upon its regime and its order of values. All the while it has known that what grudging respect it has obtained from the North has come because the South has maintained the standards of white civilization. It knows that if it were to accept without reservation the dictates of the Supreme Court, it might be turned into something like those 'mixed sections' found in large Northern cities.