Criticism Quotes

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

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

The Americans are certainly hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.

No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise.

The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

Most members of Congress are politicians. They're bores. They're damn boring. They have no imagination, and they don't know how to imagine the future.

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this; because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults, or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him.

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.

On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

Microsoft looks at new ideas, they don't evaluate whether the idea will move the industry forward, they ask, 'how will it help us sell more copies of Windows?

One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.

To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.

Crack is ruining the drug culture.

People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

He's the kind of man who picks his friends - to pieces.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Life isn't worth living until you have found something worth dying for.

To announce there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand with the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Malice will always find bad motives for good actions. - Shall we therefore never do good?

I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music.

I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.

I will not quit this game because of what the media has done to me.

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth

Time-wasting is one of the worst things we have in Portugal.

I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.

One must not criticize that which is common since it remains always the same.

The man was a deceiver. He was deceitful and I will never bite my tongue in saying that. I don't think he was anything but a politician, and he used Negroes to get elected and to get votes.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

Homeopathy is insignificant as an act of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.

I never read one hateful thing said about me by some 12-year-old. So I got to live an actual life. And I've kept that mentality. Just because there's a hurricane going on around you doesn't mean you have to open the window and look at it.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

Schools and colleges are really a factory for turning out clerks for the Government.

People will have a problem with whatever you do. At the end of the day, nobody can determine what you need to do in order to be successful and why would you listen to someone who is not successful tell you what you need to do?

And to the English court assemble now, From every region, apes of idleness!

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.

It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books.

Bad reviews I've gotten never diminished the number of people in my audience; good reviews have never added to the number of people in my audience; be your own critic.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.