A Quote by Jacques Barzun

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

Jacques Barzun

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Absurd Accept Culture Futility Normal People

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Jacques Barzun
American - Educator
November 30, 1907 - October 25, 2012

We all are [normal]. Their idea of normal just happens to be different to some other people's idea of normal. But this is the world we live in. Some people simply cannot accept something that is outside of their experience.

John Boyne

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

R. D. Laing

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

R. D. Laing

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.

Richard P. Feynman

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action.

Gore Vidal

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

I don't see decadence really as what you do, because I don't do much at all that is decadent in my life. But I still am decadent. It's a state of mind, I think.

Marianne Faithfull

I love rap, and part of hip-hop culture is being excessive and absurd, and I can't be excessive and absurd without sounding corny. So I have to do it in a very truthful, weird way.

Lil Dicky

I remember while I was at school some of my Muslim friends talked about a handful of people spoiling things in every culture. Hatred or hurt or pain isn't specific to a religion. I think it's a matter of acceptance. The one thing the world has to accept is everybody is different. What is normal to us is different and unusual to somebody else.

Jessie J

Europe is like the Roman Empire - indulged, decadent, flooded with immigrants and unprepared to fight for its culture.

Filip Dewinter

The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

W. G. Sebald

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Muhammad Yunus

I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year.

Helen Prejean

We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world.

David LaChapelle

Normal children of both sexes and all cultures will follow a more or less standard and universal developmental pattern and timetable, and reach approximately the same level of development at maturity. While a particular culture's need and expectations and teaching will shape the course of development and affect adult capabilities to some degree, normal individuals, whatever their native culture, if transplanted and taught, could learn to meet the normal demands of their adapted cultures.

Stella Chess

A Quote by Jacques Barzun

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