Critique Quotes

The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Lawyers are the jackals of commerce.

A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

Prosperity: that condition which attracts the lively interest of lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages, or indicted, or both.

The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end?

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.

Sometimes when I see a bad performance and people still clap... I wonder if they're clapping because they liked what they saw or because they're happy it's over?

TV is the rat race of the century.

That, however, is - mediocrity, though it be called moderation.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good," there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument-though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity.

Many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

The Negro's so-called 'revolt' is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!

Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

Most diseases are the result of medication which has been prescribed to relieve and take away a beneficent and warning symptom on the part of Nature.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.

I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself 'culture' a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture.

A legal or religious ceremony by which two persons of the opposite sex solemnly agree to harass and spy on each other... until death do them join.

Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Even cohabitation has been corrupted - by marriage.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

I hated the sight on TV of big, clumsy, lumbering heavyweights plodding, stalking each other like two Frankenstein monsters, clinging, slugging toe to toe. I knew I could do it better ... circle, dance, shuffle, hit and move ... make an art out of it.

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of men whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs.

I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A prætor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.

While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?

I never listen to the radio. If it's bad, I make fun of it, and if it's good, I get jealous that I didn't think of it.

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.