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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Future
Environmental
Rise
Stones
Civilization
Environment
Sustainability
Vision
Risen
Age
Pollution
Society
Stone
More quotes by Jacques Barzun
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun
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.
Jacques Barzun
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.
Jacques Barzun
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
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
Jacques Barzun
For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Jacques Barzun
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
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.
Jacques Barzun
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.
Jacques Barzun
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
Jacques Barzun
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.
Jacques Barzun
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
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
Jacques Barzun
Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
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
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
