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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?

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
Must
Nations
Corners
Domestic
Every
Freedom
Schools
Cell
Reality
Institutions
Hospitals
Rigorously
School
Private
Businesses
Vermin
Littles
Speech
Corner
Fascist
States
Nation
Maintain
Repeatedly
Little
Democracy
Cells
Fascists
Many
Public
Conquer
Excluded

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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
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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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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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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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
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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, 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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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