“In the United States as in every other democratic country, the need to-day is for a searching of the heart to discover what democracy really wants and how it can insure the fulfillment of its choice. It may choose death for itself and others; it may choose life on certain terms or unconditionally. Life without conditions can be achieved very simply by giving up and waiting — sitting and perishing in due course. Life under certain conditions of civilization means a fighting faith training its critical guns on what is daily offered us in the guise of government, education, science, art, dogma, cures, and creeds.

“The necessity for this faith and this critical war in our own culture is the great lesson of the recent past. It is not so much a new discovery as the rediscovery of a forgotten truth. And with the rediscovery we have learned the reason of our forgetfulness: we had become weary and lazy; we wanted short cuts to happiness and peace; we hoped to find rules of thumb that would answer every purpose; we were willing to join a party, sign a pledge, even enlist in an army, provided it was guaranteed to bring about the end of our troubles, by which we really meant make the last claim on our intelligence. The ‘distrust of intelligence’, the ‘retreat from reason’, were names given in alarm to what was thought to be a movement and was after all only a desertion.

“But if, as every symptom warns us, civilized life is the strenuous goal of democracy, if a diversified and vigilant culture is at once the source and the product of successful democracy, then our duty is to go over the common assumptions about familiar things, scrape the rust off our habitual opinions and see if there is any bright metal beneath, or only an oxidized mass of crumbling prejudices.

“The first of these prejudices is to believe that our choice is a political one when it is, as a matter of fact, cultural. We think that we can deal with matters that involve our life and liberty by acting as partisans, whereas the very thing we want can only be achieved by acting as artisans. I mean by this, taking and rejecting in the light of purpose, regardless of groups, labels, and the mock scrimmage of politics. I shall develop the point in my next chapter, but a single example now will make my meaning clear. People who appreciate the importance of education in a democracy often ask me whether I am for or against John Dewey and Progressive Education. The form of the question is political; it is a bid for a party vote, to which I return the cultural answer: I work for individualized teaching, for the breakdown of artificial divisions between school subjects, but against amateur psychiatry in the classroom and against the failure to teach the three R’s. My interlocutor sometimes insists: ‘But are you for it as a whole, Yes or No? Don’t sit on the fence!’ As well ask, am I for the Atlantic Ocean? I swim in it with pleasure, but deplore tidal waves and fail to see a fence in the distinction.” (Jacques Barzun, Of Human Freedom)

“Holding radical opinions is by no means a guarantee that one belongs to the thinking part. It is just as easy to be blind on the Left as on the Right. The only difference to human history is that the point of resistance to reality comes sooner or later in chronological time. How to stick to principle or social aim while facing facts as they are is the peculiar problem for human intelligence in a democratic culture, and this reliance on brain power always implies that it is free, that the choice is real. Hence, the need of resisting absolutes — that is, party labels, rigid loyalties, simple rules of thumb, easy or cynical fatalism. Anybody can take sides when things are labeled ‘revolutionary’, ‘reactionary’, or ‘democratic’. But what is it we are asked to believe, to consent to, to support? What value is there in opinions that flow from us like the saliva in Pavlov’s dogs, at the ringing of a bell? And again, if our fate is mechanically ground out by the omnipotence of interests, then why indulge in so much talk and print? If talk and print play their part, then why handle them like a mace, incapable of flexible and pointed use?” (Jacques Barzun, Of Human Freedom)

“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor ‘will forgive them the bread you give them’.” (Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change)

“You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men’s thoughts, to speak other men’s words, to follow other men’s habits. Of course, if we do not, no formal ban issues, no corporeal pain, no coarse penalty of a barbarous society is inflicted on the offender; but we are called ‘eccentric’; there is a gentle murmur of ‘most unfortunate ideas’, ‘singular young man’, ‘well-intentioned, I dare say; but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe’. The prudent, of course, conform. The place of nearly everybody depends on the opinion of every one else. There is nothing like Swift’s precept to attain the repute of a sensible man, ‘Be of the opinion of the person with whom, at the time, you are conversing’. This world is given to those whom this world can trust. Our very conversation is infected. Where are now the bold humour, the explicit statement, the grasping dogmatism of former days? They have departed, and you read in the orthodox works dreary regrets that the art of conversation has passed away. It would be as reasonable to expect the art of walking to pass away. People talk well enough when they know to whom they are speaking. We might even say that the art of conversation was improved by an application to new circumstances. ‘Secrete your intellect, use common words, say what you are expected to say’, and you shall be at peace. The secret of prosperity in common life is to be commonplace on principle.” (Walter Bagehot, The Character of Sir Robert Peel, 1856)

“Today the number of facts which are accessible are prodigious. Newspapers, radios, libraries pour over us every moment of our lives their stupendous floods of information so that perhaps the greatest educational problem of today is how to teach people to ignore the irrelevant, how to refuse to know things, before they are suffocated. For too many facts are as bad as none at all. Were I ever to write a volume for that famous How To series, it would be on How not to read more than 1500 words a day.” (W. H. Auden, Yale Daily News Banquet Address)

“If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town tomorrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil because it stifles men. Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.” (John Jay Chapman, Learning and Other Essays)

“The episodes of conflict, of legislative struggle, of school-board clash and educational campaign of which that life was made up, all have the enduring interest that clings to scenes which are lighted up by a true light — things which have been seen in their passage by the eye of genius. Not by their own virtue, but by this vision do they live. Howe’s central thesis is thus given in his own words by Sanborn, being quoted from a report of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities, 1866:

‘The attempt to reduce to its lowest point the number of the dependent, vicious and criminal classes, and tenderly provide for those who cannot be lifted out of them, is surely worthy the best effort of a Christian people. But that the work may be well done, it must be by the people themselves, directly, and in the spirit of Him who taught that the poor ye shall always have with you — that is, near you — in your heart and affections, within your sight and knowledge; and not thrust far away from you, and always shut up alone by themselves in almshouses, or reformatories, that they may be kept at the cheapest rate by such a cold abstraction as a state government. The people cannot be absolved from these duties of charily which require knowledge of and sympathy with sufferers; and they should never needlessly delegate the power of doing good. There can be no vicarious virtue; and true charity is not done by deputy.'” (John Jay Chapman, Learning and Other Essays)

Available at: https://iwpbooks.me/collections-of-translations

• 195 English Translations of Horace’s Carpe Diem (PDF)
• 220 English Translations of Horace’s Integer Vitae (PDF)
• 156 English Translations of Horace’s Aequam Memento (PDF)
• 209 English Translations of Horace’s Otium Divos (PDF)
• 239 English Translations of Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (PDF)
• 181 English Translations of Horace’s Diffugere Nives (PDF)

“In the light of this description the analogy so passively received nowadays, of the mind as computer, is manifestly fallacious. A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to ‘know’ — bits of information all cast in the digital mode — has no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and the program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority. Homer nods, Shakespeare writes twaddle, Newton makes mistakes, you and I have been known to talk nonsense. But they and we can (as the phrase goes) surpass ourselves, invent, discover, create. The late John von Neumann, mathematician, logician, and inventor of game theory, would not allow one to liken the mind to a computer. He knew how his mind worked and he understood his computer. So goodbye to all the bright remarks, in fiction and conversation, about programming oneself to pass an interview.” (Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James)

“Quite simply: it is a book one wants to reread. It can stand rereading because it is very full — of ideas and feelings, of scenes and persons real or imagined, of strange accidents and situations and judgments of behavior: it is a world in itself, like and unlike the world already in our head. For this reason, this fullness, it may well be ‘hard to get into’. But it somehow compels one to keep turning the page, and at the end the wish to reread is clear and strong: one senses that the work contains more than met the eye the first time around.” (Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning)