Jacques Barzun

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.

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

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.

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

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.

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

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

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

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

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

"Plain English" - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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