Criticism Quotes

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”

“They have a plentiful lack of wit.”

“Thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows.”

“Is this government of Britain's Isle, and this the royalty of Albion's King?”

“thy wit is a very bitter sweeting; it is a most sharp sauce.”

“Thou frothy tickle-brained hedge-pig!”

“Why, who cries out on pride that can therein tax any private party? Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea till the weary very means do ebb?”

“She says I am not fair, that I lack manners;She calls me proud, and that she could not love me,Were man as rare as Phoenix.”

“Why, i' faith, methinks she's too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her. (Benedick, from Much Ado About Nothing)”

“Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty.”

“I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.”

“A college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humor. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram?”

“No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.”

“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

“Fear, when your friends say to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgement for years to come, you may begin to hope.”

“I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.”

“All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.”

“Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature.”

“Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.”

“In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.”

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is a fateful fatalistic apathy.”

“The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.”

“I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.”

“Read proudly--put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe I am charmed.”

“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.”