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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.

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
Strangers
Listen
Reports
Seen
Willingness
Face
Shaw
Faces
Consideration
Wont
Stranger
Pose
Lack
Gentleness
Complete
Report
Surprise

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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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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
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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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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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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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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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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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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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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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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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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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