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

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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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The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
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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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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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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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[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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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