Jacques Barzun Quotes

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

I do believe the most important thing I can do now is to help young people understand the past and prepare for the future.

'The Truth' is not meant to preach or point any fingers. It's meant to show that perhaps we should all avoid taking the moral high ground unless we have thought about things a bit more.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

I believe it's worth observing terrible things people have done as clearly and rationally as we can to show that our monsters are not caricatures.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

I don't believe so much in good and evil.

We live in a society where not everybody has intelligence, or understanding or is thinking of what's right and what's wrong.

Education, school should prepare us not to morally judge everyone, but to be able to find our own truth in this world of various points of view.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

I think a sense of history and perspective for our young people today is essential.

If I could tell every Trump supporter two things, it would be to travel and read a history book. Look beyond yourselves; look at how petty the morals you uphold seem when you realize we are not the only ones.

Knowledge is not a guarantee of good political behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

I don't see the benefit in giving yourself a belief system that allows you to judge other people.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!