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.

It is tempting to follow a policy of malign neglect toward Chomsky's latest screed. But ignoring the book may foster the false impression that Chomsky's revelations are somehow too explosive to be challenged in a major newspaper. A far wiser course is to point out the inconsistent arguments and shrill assertions that are Chomsky's contribution to the public debate. [...] It would be unfortunate if Chomsky's momentary popularity overshadows infinitely more reasoned critiques of Bush administration policies. There are serious questions that should be weighed as America girds for final war against Saddam Hussein and dispatches military advisers to nations like the Philippines. Chomsky and his camp followers do not have a monopoly on dissent. The best response to the frenzied e-mailed dispatches from this left-wing crank remains public disclosure and ridicule. --Walter Shapiro, May 7, 2002 [218]

...the self-indulgent and auto-congratulatory Noam Chomsky, arguably one of the most virulent anti-Semitic Jews you can hope to encounter. His endless diatribes on what he wants you to believe to be the horrible treatment of the Palestinian people at the hands of the cold-hearted Israeli oppressors are unparalleled in literary hyperbole. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer one shred of evidence to back this up. He invites you to join him, the consummate Jewish intellect, in collective snobbery by simply accepting (because you are so frightfully well-educated as he is) that what he says is so. I have yet to see one single person stand up and ask, 'Dr. Chomsky, what is the evidence for this?' Should this take place, hopefully there will be a paramedic team standing by to resuscitate him. --Moss David Posner, July 3, 2006 [234]

You only got away with that because you're a woman

The only perspective that matters is the human one, Tagiri knew. We are the only ones who care; we are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics

You're not as smart as you think you are You're not smart enough to judge

On September 6, 1995 La Stampa, Turin's daily newspaper, titled at full page 'Is Mary Poppins really Satan?'. Many readers were, understandably, surprised but no reader was more astonished than the undersigned. In fact I learned from the article that I had accused Mary Poppins to have 'clear links with the esoteric and satanic thought'. I was credited for having discovered that 'under the gentle mask of the extraordinary nanny a dangerous creature was hidden, with features no less than satanic'. The same journalist, appropriately, interviewed an exorcist who complained that 'Introvigne normally minimizes the presence of Satan in our life' (a reference to my book on Satanism, where I argue that the number of real Satanists is minimum compared to the number of those who promote Satanism scares). But this, for the exorcist, amounted to still more convincing evidence that Mary Poppins was really satanic: 'If someone like Massimo Introvigne has written such a thing, this could only mean that the danger is really there'. The problem was, however, that I had never written such a thing.

Mary Poppins seems the epitome of the punishing governess, the bullying woman who has an apt saying for every occasion, and who subdues children as they were subdued in the Victorian age, when they were seen and not heard. ... She carefully hides her compassion. Almost sadistic at times, Mary is never really nasty but often very sharp. She is a controlling force, making order from disorder, making magic, and then never admitting magic took place. ... Mary Poppins threatens to leave at a point of time which only she controls. She tells her charges she will be with them until the wind changes or until her necklace breaks. She never tells them where she has come from, where she intends to go or who she really is. But she leaves many clues. Like Francis of Assisi, she is close to animals and birds, with whom she can talk. Like Jesus she helps the poor and weak. She understands the universe and seems to take part in its creation and renewal. She is known as the Great Expectation, the Oddity, the Misfit.

He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness... He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them. ~ Clive James

For fifteen centuries the religion of the Western world has been Christianity, Western Christianity, and there is no other religion now known or even imaginable that could take its place. But it is simply an historical fact, which we must deplore but cannot change, that only a small part of our population today, 12 or 15 per cent., really believes that Christ was the son of God, that the soul is immortal, and that our sins will be punished in a future life. That means that the religious instinct, which is a part of our nature, finds in the majority of our people no satisfaction in an unquestioning faith; so that those frustrated instincts are available for exploitation by any halfway clever scoundrel, as the shysters and punks who now occupy the majority of our pulpits well know. When faith is lost, what Pareto calls the religious residue in a people becomes its most vulnerable point, its Achilles heel. It is the unsatisfied need for an unquestioning faith in a superior power.

Wagner has great moments but dull quarter hours - Rossini

It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that 'Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality'; another opined that 'he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced.' A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's 'punishing regime of self-abuse' as part of 'the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed.' These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.

...it is widely but wrongly believed that Beavis and Butt-Head celebrates its characters, and applauds their sublime lack of values, taste and intelligence. I've never thought so. I believe Mike Judge would rather die than share a taxi ride to the airport with his characters--that for him, B&B function like Dilbert's co-workers in the Scott Adams universe. They are a target for his anger against the rising tide of stupidity.

Sean Hannity flip-flops so fast his head swivels completely around ... self-proclaimed McCain surrogate Sean Hannity of Fox Noise, victim of one of the funniest moments in broadcasting history last night. After the story of North Korea's deal to end its nuclear program, Hannity went on to cheer lead for President Bush and bash his media critics. 'The news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration,' he pleaded. Then he got angry. 'But will the press report it that way?' He then introduced his guest, former unconfirmed UN Ambassador John Bolton, who promptly completely disagreed with him. 'I think it's actually a clear victory for North Korea, demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.' Hannity promptly went from 100 percent for the Korea nuke deal to 100 percent against it. 'Boy, I tell you, they've done it time and time again. I'm sort of perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well, knowing that they haven't kept the agreements in the past.' In addition to his case of perplexity, Mr. Hannity is said to be recovering from third-degree whiplash. Sean Hannity, today's worst person in the world!

Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone. ~ Philip K. Dick

Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a 'flighty' person, who endeavours 'to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as 'utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.' And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, 'Is it credible that all favourable varieties of turnips are tending to become men?'; who is so ignorant of paleontology, that he can talk of the 'flowers and fruits' of the plants of the Carboniferous epoch; of comparative anatomy, that he can gravely affirm the poison apparatus of the venomous snakes to be 'entirely separate from the ordinary laws of animal life, and peculiar to themselves'... Nor does the reviewer fail to flavour this outpouring of preposterous incapacity with a little stimulation of the odium theologicum. Some inkling of the history of the conflicts between Astronomy, Geology, and Theology, leads him to keep a retreat open by the proviso that he cannot 'consent to test the truth of Natural Science by the word of Revelation;' but, for all that, he devotes pages to the exposition of his conviction that Mr. Darwin's theory 'contradicts the revealed relation of the creation to its Creator,' and is 'inconsistent with the fulness of his glory.' If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the 'Origin of Species' to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article...

'...like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car' --Unknown critic when commenting on his voice

Living proof that a pig's bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to Parliament

Niggas talk a lot of shit but that's after im gone/Cause they fear me in physical form let it be known

Now everytime I see you cats is rollin in packs/For the life of me I cannot see why you don't know how to act

So many questions, and they ask me if I'm still down/I moved up out of the ghetto, so I ain't real now?/They got so much to say, but I'm just laughin at cha

Shatter, black talon style, thoughts I throw/It remains in your brain then of course it grows

Some say the Great American Novel is 'Huckleberry Finn,' some say it's 'The Jungle,' some say it's 'The Great Gatsby.' But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession - the view of America that could only have come from an outsider - Nabokov's 'Lolita. ... 'Those who bought 'Lolita' looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. 'Lolita' is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes 'Lolita' a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but 'Lolita' forever remains a thing of timeless beauty.

An old town clerk looking at European affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Art Bell is full of crap.

Uh, Brandy, it sounds like you're giving me alot of crap and yet somebody wrote a song about you. You heard of that? Yeah? Well, you don't deserve it; you don't deserve it at all.

Phil, I've been listening to you badgering me for the past two years and I just have to ask you, do you want me to buy my own Vasaline and spread it, too?

Christ was riveted to the cross for this???

Bravo, Streicher!

They are smoking crack.

Petain in petticoats.

The Satanic school.

'T is a stinger.

...so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

I have trouble enough without I come five mile to hear him preach only hellfire and bloody damnation. Take it to heart, Mr. Parris. There are many others who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.

Clay is so young and has been misled by the wrong people... He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan.

Politicians are the same all over: they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

I've been dreaming of a time when the English are sick to death of Labour and Tories and spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell and denounce this royal line that still salutes him and will salute him forever.

His only fault is that he has no fault.

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

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city - in New York or Paris - in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. ... Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us...Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to 'popular' dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals...I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback

George Soros has a long and storied track record of being all villains to all people. Nobody that rich, and that meddlesome in international affairs - through his massive, market-influencing hedge-fund bets against national currencies, or via his multi-billion dollar 'Open Society' philanthropy in 50-plus countries - could avoid being fitted for devil's horns on a daily basis. ... Until very recently, you could place most of Soros' fiercest critics in categories marked 'paranoid' and 'anti-democratic.' In 1990s Central Europe, where he and his various organizations were ubiquitous presences (at least in the cosmopolitan capital cities), reaction to Soros was a useful if crude indicator of a politician's basic orientation. ... But now, Slavic autocrats have been joined in red-faced George-bashing by two new overlapping groups: American conservatives, and hawkish friends of Israel. ... Thus we now have the spectacle of one of the world's most active and influential anti-communists (not to mention one of its most successful capitalists) being tarred as a particularly dangerous friend of Marx and Lenin.

They did that when they tried to link Obama to Reagan early in the campaign. They're essentially assuming that people are too stupid to realize that this is a bad idea that won't save them any money at the pump... Hillary Clinton starts her rallies by saying we need jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, by the estimates of the Department of Transportation this will cost 300,000 jobs just this summer in the construction trade... It will bring repairs of our highways to a screeching halt. She talks about a findfall profits tax on the oil companies, which is a good idea: Obama and others support this as well. The problem is, that won't pay for this gas tax holiday because she's already said that the money from a windfall profits tax would be used to develop renewable energy. So she's spending that nine billion dollars twice. What she's hoping is that only elites will know any of this and that everybody else just won't care. The problem with this is that a lot of elites are superdelegates and they're not buying this.... It's a hail Mary pass, and what they're figuring is if they can run up a big victory in Indiana with this pander, and a lot of people drive long distances in Indiana, then the superdelegates will figure, Hey, maybe the best pander is the best ticket in the fall and that Obama is too hung up on the merits of these issues, the substance of these issues instead of the politics of the issues that we need to win in the old-fashioned way. That might work with the superdelegates even though they don't agree with her on the merits of the gas tax. There are a lot of what are called low-information voters. They're really not reading the unanimous newspaper editorials against this.... The thing that's so onious about this idea is that there are other kinds of relief. You could get a tax credit for people at the low end of the income scale. You could give them other forms of relief. This is the single worst kind of relief because it's terrible for global warming, terrible for foreign policy, and terrible for jobs. It's just unfortunate that she had to embrace what people agree is the single worst policy idea of the entire campaign.

The movie created a spot of controversy... Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year's Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were 'ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.' Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: 'Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers...'

Here's something you don't hear said about many movie critics: people love Roger Ebert. ... There's a good reason for this: Ebert doesn't stand between moviegoers and the audience. Rather, his regular readers are serious movie-lovers who see him as their rep, the guy out there fighting to make movies less stupid, more entertaining, more intelligent, more everything. You don't have to agree with him - and I certainly didn't in this book, when he ragged on Team America and Jesus is Magic, two movies where I laughed myself sick - to know that he's on your side. He sees the bad movies so you don't have to, and he's seen the same ones over and over. ... Mere bile, though, isn't his game; he's as interested in why movies fail as why they work. A lot of the time, it's obvious: because it's made by morons for morons. In these cases, Ebert drags us through the plot in as entertaining a fashion as possible. ... Forty years on, he's still a moviegoer's best friend.

One need not have been raised in Fresno to appreciate Saroyan, though I suppose it helps. Certainly he, better than anybody, captured the valley's strange texture: the mishmash landscape of farm, town and deserts; the jostling of so many different peoples, all a bit bewildered at finding themselves thrown together ... Certainly Fresnans never forgave Saroyan for his harsher observations about the old hometown. The more political Armenians complained he wasted too many words on the human comedy, and not enough on the tragedy of a lost homeland. That he wrote so personally, and from the heart, gave literary critics their target: He was, they scolded, an undisciplined sentimentalist, mawkish. ... For whatever reasons, Saroyan today is held under book-land quarantine. Few of his titles are in print. He's barely taught in schools. His own plans for literary legacy - a writers-in-residence program, posthumous publication of many works - have been scrapped or stalled. They did name a theater after him in Fresno, the one thing he expressly requested not be done. Those who remain under the Saroyan spell can only hope that the world will come around. His work simply seems too extraordinary, and universal, to be cleared from the shelves...

John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre - a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.