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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.

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
Except
Respect
Nothing
Convention
Conventions
Sublime
Equality
Intellect

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Life is given us as a passion.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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 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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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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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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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.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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In producers, loafing is productive and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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