Richard M. Weaver Quotes

Our opinions partake, more or less, of the prejudices of our class, party, or sect. We are all largely pledged, through interest, affection, or passion, to particular classes of opinion, and the strength of efforts to get released from these pledges, is the measure of our advancement.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment.

It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don't have to be a Jedi to manipulate people's attention.

I think it's time we all agree that gender stereotypes are simply the confabulation of our own mind.

I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.

When we judge, we are always in a psychic space which is circular.

In reality there is nothing to fear in the present. Fear is projected onto the present by memory.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Shame has poor memory.

It was just a wonderful experience, one for the memory book for sure. The sad thing about it was that the picture came under this absurd cloud of controversy. Here was a movie based on the central theme that racism is something that is taught, and it's illustrated by this story of a dog and the efforts of humans to re-train it after it had been trained to go after black people. And it created this ridiculous controversy and wound up being the last Hollywood movie that Sam [Fuller] made.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.