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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

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
Changes
Begin
Ends
Great
People
Affectation
Routine
Fake
Cultural

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Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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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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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.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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.
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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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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?
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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.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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