Carolina QuotesIf one benighted class of men begins by assuming that whatever is, is right, [contemporary radicals] begin by assuming that whatever is, is wrong. Had we to decide between these two—and I hope I make it clear that I do not think we have to decide thus—the latter would appear more blasphemous than the former because it makes a wholesale condemnation of a creation which is not ours and which exhibits the marks of a creative power that we do not begin to possess. The intent of the radical to defy all substance, or to press it into forms conceived in his mind alone … is an aggression by the self which outrages a deep-laid order of things.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“Up From Liberalism,” p. 142.
- work
- Life Without Prejudice (1965)
- year
- 1965
- locator
- p. 142
Cite this record
“If one benighted class of men begins by assuming that whatev…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-533371F725. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/533371f725
More from Richard M. Weaver
Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.
It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. … As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. … The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.
All of us have had the experience of finding a particularly felicitous phrase in poetry and of feeling: “This is what the world really means; he has hit it closer than anyone has ever hit it before.”