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To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.

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
Hate
Past
Doe
Denounce
Self
Shuts
Ignoring
Hates
Influence
Free

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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
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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.
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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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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.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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.
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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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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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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.
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