Quotessence
Home / Authors / Jacques Barzun Books
Jacques Barzun

Jacques Barzun Books

Historian

Related Quotes

“We play fast and loose with the words human and inhuman, flattering ourselves by making human mean only the good things in our makeup or simply what we approve. The historian cannot subscribe to this policy, knowing as he does that cruelty, murder, and massacre are among the most characteristic human acts.”

Human Nature
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Create image

“if one consults reason alone, one cannot assent to the articles of our faith" it was full of mysteries; "we are fools to try to explain them." This makes preaching Christianity not only a hard task but also dangerous. "Had I know, I should never have been a preacher.”

ReasonFaithChristianityPreachingMysteries
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Create image

“The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive servants - by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, rigidity and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influence. The machine is an agent of abstraction. It is itself an abstraction in that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical products. There is no fringe or fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love, The robot is a repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive.”

Artificial IntelligenceRobotsIndustrialisationMachines And Man
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Create image

“The one drawback to print is that the uniform finality of black on white leads the innocent to believe that every word so enshrined is true. And when these truths diverge from book to book (for the incentive to write and publish is also increased), the intellectual life is changed. From being more or less a duel, it becomes a free-for-all. The scrimmage makes for a blur of ideas, now accepted as a constant and fondly believed to be, like the free market, the ideal method for sifting truth.”

IdeasPrintingTruth TellingMisinformation Of The Masses
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Create image

“Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.”

MenMeanSeemsTodayCommonRaceBloodFairsAll ThingsClaimsDenyAgreementQuantityInkRecklessAmbiguousExplosives
Book:Race: a study in superstition
Create image

“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.”

IfsGivingHumansDoeImportantSoulReasonFeelingsRealityArtistPassionTermMoralBoysGreatnessBalanceIntegrityVicesCreatorIntellectMythRangeAccustomedSpecialistsScoundrelsMagnanimityBoy ScoutMoral Integrity
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“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.”

WayDoeArtWholePainTogetherLeftDifficultConsciousnessTakenExpressionShapesUniqueSentencesTerritoryPropositionsLeft AloneLeft OutTogether AgainIncomprehension
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.”

NeedsHumansTwoSoulEnoughProblemHandsActionIndividualDifficultCommonPressureInstitutionsSavingHuman SoulHeresyVigorousReconcileHazardsCoerce
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.”

WayNeedsArtRolesSpecialHumilityNeededCapacityCriticismCriticsRecognitionTemporaryIntroducingVocabularyExplainingInjection
Book:The Culture We Deserve
Create image

“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.”

ArtTodaySocialEmotionMoralIssuesInfluenceJudgmentReflectionCriticsImpulseGood ManRighteousnessSocial IssuesReflectingTributeMoral JudgmentMoralism
Book:The Culture We Deserve
Create image

“Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.”

Has BeensIdeasPhilosophyFacesLife IsCausesMillionsEffectsProduceExcitingNotionHarmAbsurdReputationPlentyNo IdeaAbstractDaily LifeSuggestionsRelativismPower Of IdeasDemoralizedWorking Alone
Book:The Culture We Deserve
Create image

“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.”

FeelsMindPersonsLawPracticeRightsGroupsCreatingIncreaseBoundariesOppressionSecureLiberationImpulseBarriersParadoxRestrictionProtective
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.”

IfsPersonsArtUsedPurposeLiteratureBehindsExistenceCasesIgnoranceDemocratPossessionHumanitarianLawyerAbsurdEducatedThanksElitesPhysiciansUnjustExploitsElitistHumiliateClergymenBenefactorsPower Over Others
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.”

WayPersonsArtEnoughArtistInterestingWonderPathWonderfulSubjectsEffectsPolicyProductsMonthsGainsOriginalsRewardsWaveTendenciesOddShockingAbsentClevernessHurdleTidal WavesAbsent Minded
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.”

WellsEndsFeelingsAbleAcceptingRolesTeachSeeingMankindPositionDutyMirrorsIncludingBelieverProphetSocialistContradictoryBrowsHereticFrivolousOratorsDodgeScepticGadflies
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.”

ThinkingMindTogetherUsedSimpleEmotionConsciousnessColorSpeechPerceptionOrdinaryWeightEmbraceComplexesIncludingAffairSensationsItemsTexturePsychologist
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”

IfsMayWholePurposeCultureThreeAsksBeliefLinesMoralShapesElementsStringsSolitaryConfiguration
Book:The Culture We Deserve
Create image

“In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.”

FactsSchoolPresidentTermSunRelationUniversityDepartmentOppositionExecutivesBureaucracyGalaxyDeanIntricateEclipse
Book:Teacher in America
Create image

“One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.”

WritingDoeSeemsReadingNaturalNumbersCuttingFlowAimAddRhythmCompositionAdequateRevisionExuberanceRevisingSmall Words
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image

“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.”

WarCountryHandsPartyGloryCompetitionGreedAliensAppealsInternalsSocialistConquestRuthlessEuropean CountriesArmamentSocialist Party
Book:Darwin, Marx, Wagner: critique of a heritage
Create image

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

InspirationalArtSchoolLostPowerfulEducationTeachTeacherTeachingTaughtTraditionRegardAppreciationGreat TeacherGood TeacherBest TeacherTeaching ChildrenGreat EducationTeaching And LearningEducation And TeachersSchool TeachersAdministratorsSchools And EducationSchool EducationGreat EducationalTeaching And EducationTeachers And TeachingTeaching EducationSchool LifeTeaching LearningInspirational TeacherInspirational EducationArt EducationGreat TeachingBeing A TeacherGood TeachingTeachers DayTeacher AppreciationInspirational EducationalArt TeacherThanking TeachersGreat SchoolsSchools And TeachersLost ArtThank You TeacherTeaching ArtRetired TeacherWonderful TeacherRetiring TeachersTeacher MotivationalShort TeacherTeacher Appreciation DayTeacher Retirement
Author:Jacques Barzun
Create image