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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.

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
Models
Shaw
Remains
Participant
Citizens
Deem
Democracy
Bernard
Society
Participants
Individual
Informed
Important
Citizen
Things
Model

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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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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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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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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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