Quote

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Jacques Barzun

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Society
Stone
Future
Environmental
Rise
Stones
Civilization
Environment
Sustainability
Vision
Risen
Age
Pollution

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

Image
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
Image
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
Jacques Barzun
Image
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
Image
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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