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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
World
Church
Disease
Wretched
Faces
Universal
Churches
Write
Poet
Diet
Political
Magic
Remedy
Pluralistic
Human
Single
Diets
Diversified
Humans
Teach
Poets
Wonderfully
Writing
Race
Chosen
Diseases
Way
Face
Sing
Races

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By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
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The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.
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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
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The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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