#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.”

“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”

“Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre & men of straw. They will have sweet tongues & silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power & India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air & water would be taxed in India.”

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

“The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.”

“Report of fashions in proud Italy Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation”

“Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.”

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.”

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

“Criticism polishes my mirror.”

“Any idiot can see something wrong. But can you see what is right?”

“Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.”

“It is very easy to say that your opponents have been guilty of a breach of faith, but it is a great mistake to splash the paint about so freely that your words cease to have any real meaning and cease to carry any sense of affront even to those to whom they are applied and cease to bear any connection with any genuine feeling of indignation on the part of those on whose behalf they are spoken.”

“Baldwin often times stumbles over the truth, but he always picks himself up and hurries on as if nothing had happened.”

“I have benefited greatly from criticism, and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof.”

“Do not criticize your government when out of the country. Never cease to do so when at home”

“A non-doer is very often a critic-that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.”

“Critics hang around and wait for others to make mistakes. But the real doers of the world have not time for criticizing others. They are too busy doing, making mistakes, improving, making progress.”

“Happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending.”

“The world today is ruled by harassed politicians absorbed in getting into office or turning out the other man so that not much room is left for debating the great issues on their merits”

“Some civil servants are neither servants nor civil.”

“He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.”

“I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”

“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

“If you wanted nothing done at all, Balfour was the man for the job.”

“I do not resent criticism, even when for the sake of emphasis; it parts for the time with reality.”