Carolina QuotesThe most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 29.
- work
- Life Without Prejudice (1965)
- year
- 1965
- locator
- p. 29
Cite this record
“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-CE67647CCA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ce67647cca
More from Richard M. Weaver
Now, with the general decay of religious faith, it is the scientists who must speak ex cathedra, whether they wish to or not.
It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things “things.” It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
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.”