Critique Quotes

To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in time of need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel. Even the utmost goodwill and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

Women and egoistic artists entertain a feeling towards science that is something composed of envy and sentimentality.

Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination,whose vast abdomens betray them.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"!

The admission fee was a viper's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto. It was a sort of intellectual slaughterhouse.

Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

You have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these American days.... Farmers' sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. Surely, men love darkness rather than light.

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents

Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.

No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.

You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.

This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

If I say, 'Oh nice,' about seven times in the same show, things aren't going well.

That invisible hand of Adam Smith seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.

THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.

Anybody who doesn't like this book is healthy

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.

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.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

My friend is one who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than what I am. . . . What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.

The danger of our culture.- We belong to a period of which the culture is in danger of being destroyed by the appliances of culture.

Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!"

The greater number of men are merely corporals.

The confusing of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

Women are considered deep - why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.

Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins culture.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.

Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

For the longest time, marriage has had a guilty conscience about itself. Should we believe it?--Yes, we should believe it.

Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?

The mass of men are very easily imposed on. They have their runways in which they always travel, and are sure to fall into any pit or box-trap set therein.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.