Quote

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.

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
Make
Factors
Thinking
Philosophical
Personality
Diverts
Intellectual
Implication
Mystery
Heredity
Race
Implications
Attention
Offering
Social
Explanation

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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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 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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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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