Carolina QuotesIt is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
p. 146
- work
- Ideas have Consequences (1948)
- year
- 1948
- locator
- p. 146
Cite this record
“It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some …” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7BAF969494. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7baf969494
More from Richard M. Weaver
The Communist … chooses some feature of an order where there is a potential resentment, or he may choose some feature about which people are simply soft-headed—that is to say, confused or uncertain. It may be the existence of rich men; it may be the right to acquire and use property privately; it may be the idea of discipline and regard in education; it may be some system of preferential advancement which produces envy in the less successful. His most common maneuver … is to vilify this as founded upon “prejudice.” The burden of his argument usually is that since these do not have perfectly rationalized bases, they have no right to exist.
When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.
Part of life has a public orientation, but part of it does not. He has a private self that looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinctness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote letters to the newspapers signed “Publius” or something like that, were giving expression to this difference. When the writer appeared before the public in the common interest, he was conscious of stepping outside of his private considerations and entering into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of the time he was his own man, which his thoughts and feelings reserved for himself.