Quote

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

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
Feels
Prejudice
Apart
Argument
Weapons
Deals
Ability
Weapon
Force
Strongest
Feel
Substance

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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
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