Critique Quotes

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle!

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.

Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.

Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom.

The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

He was seized and dragged off to King Philip, and being asked who he was, replied, "A spy upon your insatiable greed."

Integration is the method toward obtaining that goal. And what he Negro leader has done is gotten himself wrapped up in the method and has forgotten what the goal is.

If you want a good argument against democracy, spend five minutes with a voter.

People have material needs, but you don't need a deodorant for every different day of the week. You don't need four hundred varieties of mustard. This is what I call too many choices. There are too many choices in America.

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

New York is a sucked orange.

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians', and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen.

When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.

Destruction, violence, ravages, murder, are perpetrated by statute law.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths - they haven't any.

There are no bigger donkeys than these workers.... Look at our 'craftsmen'; Sad that world history should be be made with such people.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease.

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

We're crazy about this city. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy

The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.

I am stretching out this volume, since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents.

Wages? You want to be wage slaves? Answer me that! Of course not. What is it that makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Strike off your chains! Strike up the band! Strike three you're out! Remember, there's nothing like Liberty, except Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Be free, now and forever. One and individual. One for all and all for me, and tea for two and six for a quarter.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely-"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"-I wager he finds nothing!

The foods that are recommended today are as palatable as a steady diet of wet blotters.

All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

Budget: a way of going broke methodically

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence.

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.

Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.

Everything in woman hath a solution. It is called pregnancy.

The truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.

No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.