“Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.”

— Jacques Barzun

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), II
Context: Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion — to say nothing of the shape of his sentences — are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory." by Jacques Barzun?

Jacques Barzun 46

Historian 1907–2012

Related quotes

“It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Cunning
Essays (1625)

“And Lincoln pointed out that this argument—which the Court applied to the territories—could also equally well be applied to the states, so that the prospect of slavery becoming national, not only through the spread into the new territories but in the spread to the states, was very great. This was Lincoln’s argument.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

“It is the initial letters of the four points of the compass that make the word "news," and he must understand that news is that which collies from the North, East, West and South, and if it comes from only one point of the compass, then it is a class publication, and not news.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1855/mar/26/newspaper-stamp-duties-bill in the House of Commons (26 March 1855).
1850s

“What difference at this point does it make?”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, , quoted in
regarding 2012 attack on US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya
Secretary of State (2009–2013)
Context: With all due respect, the fact is, we had four dead Americans—was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night and decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.