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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

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
Great
Mind
Overthrown
Yields
Yield
Tragedy

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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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.
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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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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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To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
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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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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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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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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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