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Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

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
Style
Injustice
Education
Morality
Moral
Judging
Form
Judgment
Past
Except
Whose
Minimalist
Understood
Hasty
Among
Judgments

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Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
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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.
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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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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.
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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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.
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On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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