#Critique Quotes

“The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.”

“The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.”

“The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.”

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

“The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

“Their insatiable lust for power is only equaled by their incurable impotence in exercising it.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.”

“After a time, civil servants tend to become no longer servants and no longer civil.”

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

“To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.”

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

“However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.”

“So far as the colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we don't know what is going on in the main tent: and I don't want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions.”

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

“I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor.... Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.”

“Lots of folks are forced to skimp to support a government that won't.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.”

“The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”

“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?”

“The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government.”

“An eminent teacher of girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.”

“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.”

“We are completely saddled and bridled, and... the bank is so firmly mounted on us that we must go where it will guide.”

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”

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

“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?”

“Fame is proof that the people are gullible.”

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

“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”

“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 aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere consumers of the rent; and when compared with the active world, are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment.”

“It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes.”

“I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.”

“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.”

“Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.”

“The bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life.”

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

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

“There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.”

“The trouble with the lower classes is that they lack the sense of tragedy given to them by the upper classes.”

“What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.”