Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzunwas a French-born American historian. Focusing on ideas and culture, he wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball and classical music. He was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America, Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth30 November 1907
CountryUnited States of America
civilization age stones
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
fake-people routine ends
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
knowledge knowing judging
Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.
philosophy men age
The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
writing bad-writing scholarship
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
running expression mind
The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.
philosophical thinking offering
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.
substance weapons prejudice
Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
yield mind tragedy
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
boredom historical force
Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
hate tyrants people
The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.
battle genius inspired
The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
rivers water history
History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
passion life-is given
Life is given us as a passion.