Richard M. Weaver Quotes
The 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.
Weaver, Richard M. Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time. Louisiana State University Press, 1964.
Every time a court decides on the constitutionality of something that did not exist at the founding, the meaning is enlarged somewhat. For example is hacking into a computer a violation of the Due Process clause? Are Americans who are entitled to bear arms allowed to choose any arms now existent—ie biological weapons? Is a President who is brain dead but is breathing and kept alive by artificial means to be replaced by the Vice President? The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution of all the industrialized democracies, and yet if functions in a world the Founding Fathers would not recognize. The courts and the Amendments have kept it fundamental to our nation and still an example to the world.
Conservative ire and real hatred has not generally been pronounced in modern times for Democratic Presidents. However, the two most effective and popular Democratic Presidents of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William Clinton produced the most extreme.
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher and a mid-20th century conservative and as an authority on modern rhetoric.
