Jacques Barzun > Quotes

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

“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.”
― Jacques Barzun

“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred. ”
― Jacques Barzun

“You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.”
― Jacques Barzun

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.”
― Jacques Barzun

“no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.”
― Jacques Barzun

“The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present

“Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present

“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.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present

“The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers

“We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers

“First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers

“Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.”
― Jacques Barzun

“Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap”
― Jacques Barzun

“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”
― Jacques Barzun

“If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.”
― Jacques Barzun

“The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers

“The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers

“We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.”
― Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers