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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

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
Simple
Mother
Tongue
English
Worked

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
Jacques Barzun
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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
Jacques Barzun
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In producers, loafing is productive and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Jacques Barzun
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun
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The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.
Jacques Barzun
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Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
Jacques Barzun
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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
Jacques Barzun
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun
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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Jacques Barzun
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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
Jacques Barzun