Jacques Barzun Quotes About Philosophy

• It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

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  Jacques Barzun

  1964 Science, The Glorious Entertainment.

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• 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.

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  Jacques Barzun

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

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  Jacques Barzun

  Jacques Barzun (1961). “Classic, Romantic, and Modern”, p.14, University of Chicago Press

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• 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.

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  Jacques Barzun

  The House of Intellect ch. 6 (1959)

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