Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Public
Conquer
Excluded
Many
Nations
Corners
Domestic
Must
Freedom
Schools
Cell
Every
Reality
Institutions
Hospitals
Rigorously
School
Private
Businesses
Vermin
Littles
Speech
Corner
Fascist
Nation
Maintain
Repeatedly
States
Democracy
Cells
Fascists
Little

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

Image
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
Image
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Life is given us as a passion.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
Image
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
Image
By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
Image
For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Jacques Barzun