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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
Past
Doe
Denounce
Self
Shuts
Ignoring
Hates
Influence
Free
Hate

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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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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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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.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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