Journalist Mark Hertsgaard is often displeased by what he observes: an America whose Weltanschauung is smug and insular. —— Peter Rose; The Christian Science Monitor; Dec 19, 2002

Another problem, of course, is that Clinton probably didn't spend his life planning a run for the presidency so that he could diminish its importance. In the popular mind, and most likely in Clinton's own, the great Presidents were the strong and visible ones who accumulated power--the Abraham Lincolns, not the Calvin Coolidges. And in the end there is only so much that Clinton himself can do, even if he were to agree with Lowi and like-minded scholars. News coverage revolves around strong personas: in the Weltanschauung of the Washington press corps, the President must be the focus of events. The press would likely rebel against any moves that dictated otherwise. Moreover, if the rise of the Cold War and the age of broadcasting contributed to the growth of the executive branch, they were hardly the only factors. The rise of the regulatory and social-welfare state which began in the Roosevelt Administration has played a major role too. —— Steven Stark; The First Postmodern Presidency; The Atlantic; April 1993

When you grow up in an epoch seemingly dedicated to extermination, it influences your world view for life. Opinions can change - they are on the surface of the mind - but a world view is part of the soul, as fundamental as your sense of what is fair or funny. When we shy from a man who tells tasteless jokes, it isn't his wit that we don't like, it's his Weltanschauung. Hitler, after all, could be quite a card. —— Clive James; Echoes from Another Century; Guardian; June 23, 2001

The central conceit of this thoughtful and wide-ranging memoir is that the families whose fortunes rose with the cold war -- families led by newly trained technocrats and former military men like Mr. Beers's father, who went to work in the late 1950's as an engineer for Lockheed -- constituted a new American ''tribe,'' with its own rituals, architecture, speech and Weltanschauung. The author calls them ''blue sky'' people, a canny designation that conveys much of the life sponsored by the defense industry in its heyday: the California settings, with their perfect climates; the pre-eminence of aerospace; the sense of limitlessness fostered by an almost religious belief in technology; and, above all, the relentless optimism of a time and place ''where people, like things in general, were always looking up.'' —— Rand Richards Cooper; California Dreamin'; The New York Times; Oct 27, 1996

Yet no student of philosophy or theology would ever describe his position as "Audenesque" and be understood to possess some distinct world-view: the connotations of the word are atmospheric, syntactical, to do with style and place and a truly original blend of the loftily abstract with the eerily local. "Audenesque" is of no help at all in terms of what Auden actually believed, since the only constant in the poet's philosophy over the decades was its mutability. From precocious childhood to premature old age, he fell for systems and world-views like a lover, intensely and profoundly. Then he asked too much of them and wound up disappointed, wondering how he could have been so foolish: he settled down with Chester Kallman for a good deal longer than he subscribed to any satisfactory Weltanschauung. —— Glyn Maxwell; Putting the World to Rights; Guardian; Sept 14 2002

Did you know? (Merriam-Webster)
The German word "Weltanschauung" literally means "world view"; it combines "Welt" ("world") with "Anschauung" ("view"), which ultimately derives from the Middle High German verb "schouwen" ("to look at, see"). When we first adopted it from German in the mid-19th century, "weltanschauung" referred to a philosophical view or apprehension of the universe, and this sense is still the most widely used. It can also describe a more general philosophy of life or ideology.

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