Carolina QuotesThe most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist. … He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
p. 54
- work
- Ideas have Consequences (1948)
- year
- 1948
- locator
- p. 54
Cite this record
“The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E95B3A5107. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e95b3a5107
More from Richard M. Weaver
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.
Those who based their lives on the unintelligence of sentimentality fight to save themselves with the unintelligence of brutality.
If 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.