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
Jacques Barzun quotes about
civilization age stones
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
equality sublime conventions
Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
country war party
Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.
boredom historical force
Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
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.
summer winter swim
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.
historical details pages
No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.
natural-elements may anarchy
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.
piano-music names piano-playing
The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
science men games
Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
swings intellectual privilege
Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap
creative shadow west
It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.
excellence calling praise
Everybody keeps calling for Excellence excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.
science causes chiefs
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.