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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

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
Trying
Good
Expound
Haphazard
Meetings
Advice
Talk
Ideas

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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
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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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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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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