1,413 Criticism Quotes

Sectarian feelings and criticism of other teachings or other sects is very bad, poisonous, and should be avoided.

Well, I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

Did Stanton say I was a damned fool? Then I dare say I must be one, for Stanton is generally right and he always says what he means.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

The universalists, the idealists, the Utopians all aim too high. They give promises of an unattainable paradise, and by doing so they deceive mankind. Whatever label they wear, whether they call themselves Christians, Communists, humanitarians, whether they are merely sincere but stupid or wire-pullers and cynics, they are all makers of slaves. I myself have always kept my eye fixed on a paradise which, in the nature of things, lies well within our reach. I mean an improvement in the lot of the German people. (21st February 1945)

I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

When you're dealing with someone who only has a pair of underpants on, if you take his underpants off, he has nothing left - he's naked. You're better off trying to find him a pair of trousers to complement him rather than change him.

I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.

The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!

It would be easier for me to reject all established values, if I knew what they were.

They laughed at Edison and Einstein, but somehow I still feel uncomfortable when they laugh at me.

At great expense, we have built a vast system of inter-connecting stupidities.

What the hell has Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did.

I lived with people who had varied opinions, some of whom did not accept my Nazi views. I encouraged this. If a man said something that was critical of me or my ideas, I wouldn't consider him an enemy.

I'm not denouncing the church, and I'm not interested in people who want me to denounce the church. It's not a church worthy of denouncing.

If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

My feeling is that Darwinism is only at best a partial solution, and an extremely dangerous partial solution. I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don't think it explains individual species evolution at all well.

But when I talk to people who are Darwinists or evolutionists and say, 'Well, how did life begin' -- they're...they don't have an answer. I mean, they have an answer, but it's a BS answer. It's an answer that wouldn't make sense to a small child.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

The only thing Madonna will ever do like a virgin is give birth in a stable.

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.

You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they're going to know the truth when I do this book!

I think with anybody who's doing well in the public eye or whatever, there's always gonna be a shift because people don't wanna see somebody happy all the time. And they're gonna try to take shots at people.

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism.

As well as being a vulgar producer of her own spectacle, and an embarrassment to her family, Cindy Sheehan is at best a shifty fantasist.

This is a James Taylor moment and we are stuck with a piano player who wants to sound like Enya and a southern funk band that, somewhere along the line, fell into thinking Alabama is a sweet place to call home.

If worship is sustenance, then modern worship is fast food.

What will my enemies not say, that for the safety of her life a maiden queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?

Mark: Hayley I know that during this last week there's been a little, um, sort of non-verbal tension between us and it's never really been about you as a person. It's definitely not because you as a person, there's so much to admire. There really is. Your heart and your will is just enormous and there are so many people who have had hits without having classically great recording voices and they've done it on the strength of their spirit and the strength of their heart and you've got all of that and heaps.

Dicko said that he thinks Mark has a problem with her and thinks she doesn't have a recordable voice. Mark agreed but said if David Hasselhoff can sell records so can Hayley.

'You're a little early, and that is very presumptuous on your part.' (from 'Flower Lady #2)

'Runway is just old hat to me, sweetheart.' (from 'The Gay Model')

I do not endorse them [Landmark Education] - never have. The SOBs have already sued me once. I'm afraid to tell you what I really think about them because I'm not covered by any lawyers like I was when I wrote my book.

FEMA doesn't evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications...Many may be surprised to learn that, guess what, FEMA doesn't own fire trucks. We don't own ambulances. We don't own search and rescue equipment. The people of FEMA are being tired of being beat up, and they don't deserve it.

I don't mind the negative press. Well, actually, I do, but I try to ignore it. But it is really wearing out the family.

In my opinion Mr. Moore is a greater poet than Mr. Yeats. He has lived obscurely, and has not displayed Mr. Yeats's talent for self-dramatization; for these reasons and others he has never become a public figure or a popular writer.

She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor

We have a pretty witty king, Whose word no man relies on; He never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.

Kurt Cobain often ridiculed rival Pearl Jam, arguing that it lacked the underground purity of Nirvana - that it was simply an old-line commercial rock band in grunge clothing. But Cobain, who was 27 when he died, liked Vedder personally, and that made him feel guilty about the put-downs. 'I'm not going to do that anymore,' he said in a 1992 interview. 'It hurts Eddie and he's a good guy'; L.A. Times 5/1/94, 'He Didn't Ask for All This' (Cobain about Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam)

Jesus was most certainly not a Jew. The Jews would never have handed one of their own people to the Roman courts; they would have condemned Him themselves. It is quite probable that a large number of the descendants of the Roman legionaries, mostly Gauls, were living in Galilee, and Jesus was probably one of them. His mother may well have been a Jewess. Jesus fought against the materialism of His age, and, therefore, against the Jews. Paul of Tarsus, who was originally one of the most stubborn enemies of the Christians, suddenly realised the immense possibilities of using, intelligently and for other ends, an idea which was exercising such great powers of fascination. He realised that the judicious exploitation of this idea among non-Jews would give him far greater power in the world than would the promise of material profit to the Jews themselves. It was then that the future St. Paul distorted with diabolical cunning the Christian idea. out of this idea, which was a declaration of war on the golden calf, on the egotism and the materialism of the Jews, he created a rallying point for slaves of all kinds against the elite, the masters and those in dominant authority. The religion fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing but the Communism of to-day.

The guy should never ever play football again

On Jerry Falwell: I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to. The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we're not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven - I'm glad to see he skipped the rapture and was found on the floor of his office - while the rest of us go to hell. How dare they talk to children like this, how dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like Elmer Gantry radio stations and fly around in private jets as he did, giggling and snickering all the time at what he was getting away with?:How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present amongst us and is an adult male Jew, while all the time fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendos into American politics along with his friends Robertson and Graham, encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of as holy land to the people who already lived there, undercutting and ruining every democrat and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God? He's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagoguery:the fact is that the country suffers to a considerable extent from paying too much by way of compliment to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith - Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard: Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets and frauds who prey on the gullible:He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking 'I've got away with it again!':I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud and I think if he read the Bible at all - and I would doubt whether he could actually read any long book at all - that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way. I'm gonna repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It's very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd 'Yeah you gotta like the Jews cos they can make more money in ten minutes than you can make in a lifetime.' He was also full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti-Semitic innuendo, yet, in the most base and hypocritical way, he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachim Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Medal, celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East. Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man.

Leavin' Sacramento, Sacramento there I go Leavin' Sacramento Sacramento there I go They got some fat-assed women there and Rock is gonna just say no Well I might take a plane, I might take a train, How do you people live here? You must be insane I'm leavin' Sacramento, Sacramento I won't stay, But I'll be sure to come back when the Lakers beat the Kings in May! I'll be sure to comeback when the Lakers beat the Kings in May

...[H]eaven for climate, Hell for society.

(To Ric Flair) Nature Boy, it's me, Mick Foley. I'm gonna send this message out to you directly. I guess it's a rebuttal of sorts in return for the claims you made against me two weeks ago on RAW. The first claim I'd like to address is that I took the easy way out in everything during my entire career, a claim that strikes me as quite odd, coming from a guy who's claim to authorship consisted solely of talking out the side of his ass while drinking heavily for a couple of days, having a professional ghost writer record the conversations and then write down things in a book, and then Ric Flair of course slaps his name on the cover of that book and calls himself an author. Strikes me as being funny seeing as how I actually spent months laboring for hundreds of hours, seven hundred and sixty pages of handwritten notebook paper pouring my heart and soul out to what would become a New York Times number one bestseller, a towering bestseller, Have a Nice Day, in which I made claims that Ric Flair may have been a less than ideal person to work for back in the mid 1990s in WCW. You see, Ric, I wanna bring you back to a time, Munich, Germany, in March of 1994 when you were my boss. Who's kidding who, Ric? You were in charge of my career! And on that night, I got my head tangled up in ropes that were a little bit too tight. I saw blood spattering on the blue mats outside. And I got back inside that ring and I threw a punch and you know what happened? My ear fell off! It fell to the ground! And by some fluke, a referee who spoke no English picked it up, handed it off to a ring announcer who tip-toed to the back. He handed it to you, Ric Flair, and said 'I've got Cactus Jack's ear,' (Remember that name, Ric?) 'What do you want me to do with it?' And Ric Flair suggested we put that ear in a bag of ice. And then Ric, you went outside and you know what you saw? Me! In the ring! Still wrestling! Does that strike you as the easy way out?! I'm a guy who travelled a thousand miles round-trip every week to learn this trade! Slept in my car! Dined on peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches 'til I felt like puking! To learn, from the bottom up, and then I get accused of not knowing how to wrestle by a guy who's main wrestling hold these days is touching another man's genitalia! Oh yeah, heading into Vengeance, Ric, I hadn't been in fear of another man since I had been an alter boy. And then you had the nerve to say oh, you've wrestled every bad-ass there is, and I'm not one of 'em! Well tell me this, Ric, how much worse could they have messed you up? These imaginary bad-asses from your past. How much worse could they have made you bleed? How much more could your family have cried? And now you wanna stand there and say 'when you get in the ring with me it's gonna be all night long, all day long.' Find a new cliche, you used up hack! Because on that day, when I saw your family cry, the space you occupied in my mind for fourteen years was gone. You no longer matter to me, Ric. You brag about your sixteen titles all you want, but I got titles of my own that count. I'm the hardcore legend! I'm a three-time WWE Champion! I'm a two-time New York Times number one bestselling author written by hand! With my mind, my heart, my desire! I've been interviewed twice by Katie Couric, and I'm a personal friend of Melina. And you, Ric Flair, whether you like it, WOOO!, or whether you don't, learn to live with it, because you get no rematch. YOU'RE OUT OF MY LIFE, YOU WASHED UP PIECE OF CRAP! YEAH~!

The musical equivalent of St. Pancras Station

One of the most engaging artists to emerge from Great Britain in the last decade. ~ Art in America

...What people miss about (Marilyn) Manson is that he is just reflecting, he's an artist, people want to focus that energy on him, but it's not really him, it's really about you. So for every guy sitting there with a beer and a .45 in his belt, Manson is just speaking to that end of society. He's speaking as an artist. He's not speaking as himself, and that's where people get really lost with Manson.

I'm finished with the old chess, it's rotten to the core

If you mention to a woman that the song is disgusting and mysoginistic, they all give you the same answer: 'He ain't talking 'bout me!' Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick : He said your name! 'No, he didn't!' Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick :

Rushdie had written a book of nonfiction which offered critical but decided support to the Nicaraguan revolution. He had also been eloquent about the rights of the ever-relegated Palestinians. What more natural, when he was threatened with assassination by contract, than to jubilate about a terrorist-symp who had been caught in his own logic? I counted some ten newspaper and magazine columns from the Podhoretz school, all making this same point in the same words - demonstrating the impressive Zhdanovite discipline that is the special mark of the faction. All of them seemed to regard the affair as some sort of heavenly revenge for the sin of radical promiscuity; much as they have represented the AIDS crisis as a vengeance as on sixties morality. The ethical nullity of these positions never got beyond mere gloating, and will one day help to illustrate the essential distinction between irony and brutish sarcasm.

Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to 'minimize' or 'deny' the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony 'credibility' of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize 'the other side'; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making. 1985

[Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a 'Holocaust denier' or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. 2004

Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of those attempting to see something suspect, or even less than laudable, in Dick Cheney's entirely justified, indeed, necessary, shooting of Harry Whittington. According to no less an authority than the so-called 'Daily' Kos, Mr Whittington apparently had a 'right' (granted by whom?) to wander, uncalled for and unmarked, directly into the sites of the man who was praised for his shooting by no less an authority than Lee 'Harvey' Oswald, back in the days when the Democratic Party still fought against totalitarianism, before the Jihadist wing of the extremist party of the Michael Moore faction staged their grisly coup 'd'etat' (a French word meaning, originally 'Islamo-jihadist of the Left' [...] but no less an authority than an old friend of mine who works and fights high up in the upper echelons of the so called state 'department' a man entirely untouched by the vagaries and conspiracies of the thuggish authoritarianism of the so called 'C' IA which ran through the cobbled streets of the State like a veritable whirlwind of Reaganite self-certainty, disenobling the watery flow of power from that much vaunted fountain of secularism best known as the white 'house' to those too ignorant to realise its true role as the 'house' of the illuminati: as this man, to repeat, told me, myself, and, indeed, I (or as it were, we) this Mr Whittington was on his way, even as Dick unleashed his mighty cannon, to buy uranium from Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, who are, as we speak, meeting on the so called 'far' side of the moon in order to unveil a proto-'ji' hadist empire of neo-caliphatinism a word that, were it to be real, would be no less real than the threat of apre-jihadist terror that my good friend 'dick' had the temerity, indeed, the accuracy, to stop.

'And Clay, I want to say something to you. I think you are one of the few people I've met throughout this competition who can take criticism like a grown up. Learn, You definitely got better, You've lost some of this facial thing which I think was distracting, and You just did a really grown up, fantastic performance. Congratulation.' - Simon Cowell on 'Solitaire' -

I could scarcely keep from laughing at this scrupulous manner of waging war. I cited the European example as a much more forceful policy. A monarch is careful not to overlook any advantage for victory. She had some questions about that: 'Tell me,' she said, 'do your princes have no other pretext for war than might makes right?' 'Yes,' I answered, 'the justice of their cause.' 'Why, then,' she continued, 'do they not choose to be reconciled by impartial judges? And if it is determined that both sides are in the right, then why not maintain the status quo? Or why not play a game of gin rummy for the town or province they're arguing over? But no, while they cause the death of four million men who are better than they, they stay in their strategy rooms making light of the way the poor fellows are being massacred. But I'm wrong to criticize the valour of your brave men. It's important to die for one's country when it means being the subject of a king who wears a ruffled collar or a pleated one.'

no insect likes human beings and if you think you can see why the only reason i tolerate you is because you seem less human to me than most of them

The one...thing which mattered about any poem (so ran my second poetic period's credo) was what the poem said; it's socalled meaning.... Thus it will be seen that, by the year 1900, one growing American boy had reached exactly that stage of 'intellectual development' beyond which every ungrowing Marxist adult of today is strictly forbidden...ever to pass.

They took your life apart And called your failures art They were wrong, though They won't know 'Til tomorrow

'Ev has become an ethical pygmy.' - Stan Turley, President of Arizona State Senate

The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she is unbearable. ~ Director William Wyler, after working with her on the film Come and Get It

The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to 'match up' with the rest of the picture.

'The British music press has taken a beating the last couple of nights from us (...) but they're fucking wankers, they eat shit in the bath.' -London, 1978

Book review: Aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Then soon after my delight with Stein was jolted; a political critic of the reddest persuasion condemned Stein in a newspaper article, calling her decadent, implying that she reclined upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish day and night and was a hopeless prey to hallucinations. I asked myself if I were wrong or crazy or decadent. Being simple minded, I decided upon a very practical way of determining the worth of the prose of Stein, a prose I had accepted without qualms or distress. I gathered a group of semi-illiterate Negro workers into a Chicago basement and read them Melanctha aloud. They were enthralled, interrupting me constantly to tell where and when they had met such a strange and melancholy gal. I was convinced and Miss Stein's book never bothered or frightened me after that. If Negro stockyard workers could understand the stuff when it was read aloud to them, then surely anybody else could if they wanted to read with their ears as well as their eyes. For the prose of Stein is but the repetitive contemporaneousness of our living speech woven into a grammarless form of narrative...

In the tragedy in question, for example, he condemned the ideas but admired the style, abhorred the conception but praised all the details, found the characters impossible but their speeches marvelous

Essay on Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi

Master of Disgust - Salon.com

Observer review of Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life + Extract

'He's as reliable as a Volvo.' Colin Powell

Somebody said...Where are the dreamers Somebody said...Dead Somebody said...Here comes the holy rollers Tryin' to sell us all the screamers instead.

The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world,-at least, with respect to himself. Personally, I doubt not, that he rather prefers to be generally esteemed but a so-so sort of author; being willing to reserve the thorough and acute appreciation of what he is, to that party most qualified to judge-that is, to himself. Besides, at the bottom of their natures, men like Hawthorne, in many things, deem the plaudits of the public such strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity in the object of them, that it would in some degree render them doubtful of their own powers, did they hear much and vociferous braying concerning them in the public

I am not a sensitive person, but these remarks carry a sting. - Sir Lulie

If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drillin' rights on that man's head. - On George W. Bush

Sir - In finding so much to praise in 'Entertaining Mr. Sloane,' which seems to be nothing more than a highly sensationalized, lurid, crude and over-dramatised picture of life at its lowest, surely your dramatic critic has taken leave of his senses. The effect this nauseating work had on me was to make we want to fill my lungs with some fresh, wholesome Leicester Square air. A distinguished critic, if I quote him correctly, felt the sensation of snakes crawling around his ankles while watching it. Yours truly, Peter Pinnell

He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. No realist can love romantic Art so much as he loves his own, but when that Art fulfils the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no blind partisan, he must admit it. The romanticist will never be amused by realism, but let him not for that reason be so parochial as to think that realism, when it achieves vitality, is not Art. For what is Art but the perfected expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits? If found not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, true to its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned part to whole; so that it lives - then, realistic or romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass! Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their temperaments are not our own?

You could kill your wife and there's no such thing as 25 to life as long as you've got the cash to pay for Cochran.~ Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous, Good Charlotte

Aerial succeeds because it's all there for a reason. And because the good stuff is just so sublime. 'King of the Mountain', Bush's Elvis-inspired single, is both a fine opener and a total red herring. Bush's juices really get going on 'Pi', a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places. It's closely followed by a gushing ode to Bush's son, Bertie, that's stark and medieval-sounding. The rest of disc one (aka A Sea of Honey) sets a very high bar for disc two, with the Joan of Arc-themed 'Joanni' and the downright poppy 'How to Be Invisible' raising the hair on your arms into a Mexican wave. Disc two, subtitled A Sky of Honey, is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.

Some teachers of mankind - as Plato... the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists - have gone so far as to repudiate art. ...[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. ...such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied - one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. ...Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.

I stood in front of a hundred and one critics at a critic's convention, ... and a critic asked me, 'Miss Cho, isn't it true that your management asked you to lose weight to play the part of yourself in your own TV show?' Gail [the producer] grabbed the mike from me and said, 'There is no truth in that whatsoever.' I... was so... hungry.

This is a very strange time we're living in, ... and I would feel a little bit better if George W. Bush could say the word 'nuclear' correctly...You would have thought somebody would have said something by now. At the very least, Condoleezza Rice would have got up in his face, 'Foo', it's NU-CLE-AR! Imma have'ta write it down fo'ya! ...I'm makin' flash cards for the President. This is...*shaking her head* mm-mmmm.'

[Promo from July 24th 2006] What has become of Ric Flair? You see I'm in a state of disbelief because I watched Raw last Monday and found it hard to believe that Ric Flair resorted to calling me fat boy. Fat boy, a name so effective he chose to use it twice and I have to admit the name hurt. Yeah, the name fat boy hurt when my brother used it on me 30 years ago. What has become of Ric Flair? You see it hurts me worse than anything just to see Ric Flair proving to the world, one of the all time great performers in our business, proving to the world that he had the creativity, the originality and the intellect of the average fourth grader. What has become of Ric Flair!? You see I thought I was going on a journey to meet the Great and Powerful Oz! And it turns out instead I see a weak and feeble man operating behind a curtain, digging into a bag of cliches because he's got nothing left to offer! 'To be the man, you've got to beat the man!' 'I'm a 16-time world champion!' 'All night long!' blah blah blah. You make me sick Ric! What has become of you!? You've reduced yourself to being a second rate circus side show, falling on thumbtacks on an ECW show, all in vain attempt to lure me back into the ring! It's not gonna work! What part of no did you not understand? I won't fight you here, there, or anywhere. What has become of you Ric Flair? Because now not only are you a second rate freak show, but you've resorted to attacking innocent, beautiful defenseless women. And even worse Ric Flair the woman you chose to attack was a friend of mine! Which mean I'll be coming to New Jersey, Ric Flair, but I won't be coming to wrestle, but I will be coming to look you in the ring face to face and air our differences in a very public venue. And I swear to your Ric, you leave the cliches at home and you bring your heart and your mind or I will swat you away and embarrass you in front on national TV, you washed up piece of crap! I'll see you next Monday on Raw! Yeah!

If perchance there should be foolish speakers who, together with those ignorant of all mathematics, will take it upon themselves to decide concerning these things, and because of some place in the Scriptures wickedly distorted to their purpose, should dare to assail this my work, they are of no importance to me, to such an extent do I despise their judgment as rash. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, the writer celebrated in other ways but very little in mathematics, spoke somewhat childishly of the shape of the earth when he derided those who declared the earth had the shape of a ball. So it ought not to surprise students if such should laugh at us also. Mathematics is written for mathematicians to whom these our labors, if I am not mistaken, will appear to contribute something even to the ecclesiastical state the headship of which your Holiness now occupies.(Author's preface to de revolutionibus)

Nobody doubts that the Russians committed aggression, that Saddam Hussein committed aggression. We attribute to them rational goals, maybe they wanted to control the energy of the Middle East or something. With regard to ourselves, it's impossible... We just cannot adopt towards ourselves the same sane attitudes that we adopt easily, in fact reflexively, when others commit crimes... And if anyone says it, educated people, liberal intellectuals, are infuriated. Because it suggests that we could do something that's not noble. We can make mistakes, that's easy. You can criticize mistakes. You can criticize low-level crimes, like Abu-Ghraib, you can criticize that. You can criticize My Lai. But not the educated, civilized people, the kind of people we have dinner with, see at concerts, sitting in air-conditioned offices planning mass-murder. So that's beyond criticism. On the other hand, if it's half-crazed G.I.s in the field, uneducated, don't know who's gonna shot at 'em next, you can blame them, you can say how awful they are. You can criticize Lynndie England, disadvantaged young woman, very different from us. But how about the guys who organized and planned it? No.

[Chomsky's work was] subjected to an ongoing and intense scrutiny for any literal errors or bases of vulnerability, a scrutiny from which establishment experts are entirely free. This search was perhaps more intense in the United States and among its allies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with a growing body of hard-liners anxious to overcome the Vietnam syndrome, revitalize the arms race, strengthen support for Israel's rejectionism and policy of force and involve the United States in more aggressive actions towards the Soviet bloc and Third World. [...] The Cambodia and Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky. He put up a diligent defence against the attacks and charges against him, answering virtually every letter and written criticism that came to his attention. He wrote many hundreds of letters to correspondents and editors on these topics, along with numerous articles, and answered many phone enquiries and queries in interviews. The intellectual and moral drain was severe. It is an astonishing fact, however, that he was able to weather these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and integrity of his political writings virtually intact. --Edward S. Herman, In Otero (ed.), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments (Vol. III), 1994 [194]