Jacques Barzun citations (46 citations, Page 2)

Jacques Barzun: 46 citations 0 J'aime

Jacques Barzun: Citations en anglais

“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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Jacques Barzun

"What Critics Are Good For" (1988), p. 69
The Culture We Deserve (1989)

“Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the clichés of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.”

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Jacques Barzun

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), IV

“If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity.”

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Jacques Barzun

On students, in Teacher in America (1945)

“Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.”

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Jacques Barzun

"Age of Reason" https://archive.is/20130630002019/www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal?currentPage=all by Arthur Krystal, The New Yorker (2007-10-22), p. 103

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.”

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Jacques Barzun

God's Country and Mine (1954)

“We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct — magnanimity, in short — does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.”

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Jacques Barzun

Preface to the 3rd edition of Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1969)

“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.”

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Jacques Barzun

"Bernard Shaw," in A Jacques Barzun Reader : Selections from his works (2002), p. 231

“The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.”

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Jacques Barzun

"Reasons to De-Test the Schools," New York Times (1988-10-11), later published in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)

“He sent me a letter from India, where I think he got a fellowship to spend a year or so. He sent me a letter that read, I've just met a wonderful guru who can read minds. "I want you to" — Allen had a way of saying "I want you to do this, I want you to do that" — "I want you to get him a position in the Philosophy Department." I wrote back, "Dear Allen, the members of the Philosophy Department want nothing so little as to have their minds read."”

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Jacques Barzun

On Allen Ginsberg, in "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jacques Barzun, Idea Man" http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=78886, interview with Roger Gathman, The Austin Chronicle (2000-10-13)

“The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.”

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Jacques Barzun

Source: The Culture We Deserve (1989), p. 118

“Being law-abiding means filing a paper on time, not parking near a hydrant, and getting a zoning variance before moving a fence on one's own property. A world continually tighter in these ways intensifies the search for loopholes, tempts the unscrupulous to invent them, hardens the cynic, and keeps alive the urge to break loose. Such pulses of thought and feeling are bound to take away the ease and pleasure of ethical conduct. Habitual morality is baffled by the stop-and-go, and people's disregard of injunctions causes no surprise; it seems rather to show firmness of mind.”

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Jacques Barzun

"The Bugbear of Relativism," p. 98
The Culture We Deserve (1989)

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

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Jacques Barzun

Quoted in "Jacques Barzun '27: Columbia Avatar" http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan06/cover.php by Thomas Vinciguerra, Columbia Today (January 2006)