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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

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
Students
Almost
History
Always
Think
Pessimist
Thinking
Inevitably
Cheerful
Student

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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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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, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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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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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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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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 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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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