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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.

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
May
Element
Must
Complaining
Would
Agree
Elements
Amateurs
Exist
Amateur
Necessary
Anarchy
Ability
Invent
Natural
Complain

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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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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.
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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
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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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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.
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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
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