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Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.

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
Best
Generations
Strictest
Play
Creation
Renews
Mind
Game
Homo
Men
Games
Glorious
Like
Free
Thanks
Comes
Accounts
Science
Entertainment
Sense
Activity

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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
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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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The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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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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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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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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