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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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
Normal
Accepting
Culture
People
Decadent
Futility
Absurd
Accept
More quotes by Jacques Barzun
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
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
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.
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
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
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
Jacques Barzun
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
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
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
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 truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
Jacques Barzun
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
It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
Jacques Barzun
Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Jacques Barzun
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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
Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun
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
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
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun
