Jacques Barzun Quotes

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

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

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

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

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

The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect

no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.

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.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

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

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.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.

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.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.