Quotes by Jacques Barzun

“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred”

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

“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”

“Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.”

“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.”

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

“The test and the use of mans education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind”

“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”

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

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

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

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

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

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

Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

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

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop the transacting of business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

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