"The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesPeople from ParisImmigrants to the United States
Original Language: English
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"Of What Use the Classics Today?", talk at St. John's College, July 17, 1987; St. John's College Bulletin (September 1987); Paideia Bulletin (October 1989); Perspective, Council for Basic Education (Winter 1988–89); collected in The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 140
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun
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Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education.
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