The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved … - Jacques Barzun
" "The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.
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About Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American scholar, historian, critic, teacher and editor.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Jacques Martin Barzun
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Additional quotes by Jacques Barzun
Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.
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