Richard Weaver was a noted American conservative scholar whose influential book Ideas Have Consequences helped shape conservative thought in post-World War II America. Regarded as both a traditionalist conservative and a Southern Agrarian, his defense of property rights has also made him popular among Libertarians.
Quotes:
"Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these. Nothing short of a recovery of the ancient virtue of pietas can absolve man from this sin."
Ideas Have Consequences (1948), page 171
"The prevailing attitude towards nature is that form of heresy which denies substance and, in doing so, denies the rightfulness of creation. We have said - to the point of repletion, perhaps - that man is not to take his patterns from nature; but neither is he to waste himself in seeking to change her face."
Ideas Have Consequences, page 171
"The modern position seems only another manifestation of egotism, which develops when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the rights to existence of things not of his own contriving."
Ideas Have Consequences, page 171
"The true religion, it is said, is service to mankind; but this service seems to take the form of securing for him an unconditional victory over nature. Now this attitude is impious, for, as has been noted, it violates the belief that creation or nature is fundamentally good, that the ultimate reason for its laws is a mystery, and that acts of defiance such as are daily celebrated by the newspapers are subversive of cosmos."
Ideas Have Consequences, pages 171 and 172
"We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application."
Ideas Have Consequences, page 172
"Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost."
Ideas Have Consequences, page 173
"Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments. At the same time that man attempts to straighten a crooked nature, he is striving to annihilate space, which seems but another phase of the war against substance. We ignore the fact that space and matter are shock absorbers; the more we diminish them the more we reduce our privacy and security."
Ideas Have Consequences, page 173
"Nature is not something to be fought, conquered and changed according to any human whims. To some extent, of course, it has to be used. But what man should seek in regard to nature is not a complete domination but a modus vivendi - that is, a manner of living together, a coming to terms with something that was here before our time and will be here after it. The important corollary of this doctrine, it seems to me, is that man is not the lord of creation, with an omnipotent will, but a part of creation, with limitations, who ought to observe a decent humility in the face of the inscrutable."
The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, pages 220 and 221
Richard Weaver (1910 - 1963)
