R. W. K. Paterson Short Quotes

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Our ridicule and disgust are in the end aimed at some unavowed part of our own selves.

R. W. K. Paterson
… the plebeian tendency to become engrossed with the means and to avert one's eyes from the end

R. W. K. Paterson
They are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests.

R. W. K. Paterson
We want to know not merely what men have been, even the best men of their day, but what men can and ought to be.

R. W. K. Paterson
Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician 'the romantic is the real, the real the romantic'.

R. W. K. Paterson
Education refers to no particular process; rather it encapsulates criteria to which any one of a family of processes must conform.

R. W. K. Paterson
Success necessarily emasculates the spirit of rebellion. From the point of view of the true rebel the noblest cause is a lost cause.

R. W. K. Paterson
If we live in a plebeianized world, it is because so many human beings have busied themselves making a world fir only for plebeians to live in.

R. W. K. Paterson
The refusal to make the truth of nihilism one's own and build one's life entirely within its shadow is indeed a refusal of existentialism itself.

R. W. K. Paterson
It is nether fortune, status, nor power, nor even intellect, which marks out the Patrician, but intensity of consciousness and the resolve to pursue only what is truly worth pursuing.

R. W. K. Paterson
Far from invalidating the ideal, the fact that men's behaviours is in opposition to it invalidates their behaviour. We measure the cloth by the yardstick, not the yardstick by the cloth.

R. W. K. Paterson
His [the plebeian's] aim is not to teach, to correct error, but to disturb, to unsettle, to sow disillusioning seeds in the hope of spreading disillusionment as a rooted attitude of mind.

R. W. K. Paterson
The plebeian asks himself, 'What type of person am I?', and he seeks the answer by comparing the self he believes he is with the norms enshrined in the manufactured packages on public offer.

R. W. K. Paterson
It is possible to expose cowardly and degenerate hypocrisy in the name of true heroism and purity of spirit. But it is also possible to spatter mud on genuine heroes out of hatred for heroism.

R. W. K. Paterson
The fundamental optimism which is an element of all true nobility … is obviously related to courage since it refuses to be discouraged in the face of what sometimes seems overwhelming evidence.

R. W. K. Paterson