Selected critique quotes

1. Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but 'vector' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

2. Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

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

4. The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.

5. Patience is a flatterer, sir, and an ass, sir.

6. No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency.

7. The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

8. This barricade is a piece of shit. I could build better. Yeah, yeah, believe it or not, the kid with the lipstick knows how to build stuff.

9. The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

10. It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

11. America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

12. Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

13. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

14. From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

15. Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

16. Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.

17. College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

18. Typical Hollywood crowd - all the kids are on drugs, and all the adults are on roller skates.

19. Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.

20. Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

21. I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

22. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

23. New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

24. To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

25. We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

26. He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

27. When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

28. Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

29. Cancer research is a growth industry.

30. The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

31. Oh, rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.

32. Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens.

33. She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

34. Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

35. Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

36. I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.

37. Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.

38. We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.

39. Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?

40. Ben Bova seems to work very hard at working in new discoveries into his Glum Future but alas, his future is glum and not that well written.

41. This statement expresses my feelings perfectly: 'In memory of a once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.'

42. I don't think that Poindexter's nutty scheme has much real-world traction. I think the question's badly formulated, really.

43. Discussion: 'Try to keep your mind open to new ideas and never let offense stand in the way of discourse, for discourse and the exchange of ideas is the only motion by which the chaff is separated from the wheat in the world of ideas.'

44. Le progres, cette grande heresie de la decrepitude.

45. Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques.

46. My own experience in reading Dickens...is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every couple of paragraphs, and this is too uncomfortable a condition to be much alleviated by an inward recital of one's duty not to be fastidious, to gulp the stuff down in gobbets like a man.

47. My favorite song right now is impossible to defend. It's impossible. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for liking this fucking song. Lil' Jon. You know that shit: 'To the window! To The Wall! [crowd sings along] To the sweat drip from my balls!' You go to clubs, you see girls dance to that shit. 'To the sweat drip from my balls! To the sweat drip from my balls! From my balls! From my balls! My balls!' I feel sorry for the guys that gotta pick a wife out of this bunch. It's like, 'Daddy, where'd you meet Mommy?' 'Oh, she was singing about balls at a club. Skeet, skeet, skeet!'

48. What you have before you is the first known metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug.

49. From this amphibious ill-born mob began That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.

50. P. Diddy: All right, you guys ain't working as a team. I'm gonna have to shut down the studio. The only way I'll reopen the studio is if you go up to the Bronx, and get me some breast milk from a Cambodian immigrant.

51. Anyone who steals a shoe is a poser.

52. I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.

53. Atheism is the methodone of the masses. It can help to ease the pain of departure from your previous habit, but it's just as addictive, almost as dangerous, and doesn't provide nearly the rush.

54. Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all...Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, 'formalist' attempt to create originality through cheap clowning. It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.

55. a salesman is an it that stinks [part of a title of one of his poems, published in 1944)

56. Je n'admets pas qu'une femme puisse dessiner comme ca.

57. When Croft's 'Life of Dr. Young' was spoken of as a good imitation of Dr. Johnson's style, 'No, no,' said he, 'it is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak, without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl, without the inspiration.'

58. American Beer is a lot like making love on a canoe - it's fucking close to water.

59. The Church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ... What are now called the 'essential doctrines' of the Christian religion he does not even mention.

60. Classicism is a mask and does not reflect transition. How can such a static expression allow interpretation of human life as we know it? A fire house should not resemble a French Chateau, a bank a Greek temple and a university a Gothic Cathedral. All of the '-isms' are imposition on life itself, by way of previous education.

61. I've been accused of saying I was the greatest architect in the world and if I had said so, I don't think it would be very arrogant, because I don't believe there are many [great architects] - if any. For 500 years what we call architecture has been phony.

62. 'The modern world stinks.'

63. Closely connected with this is the usual attitude of the conservative to democracy. I have made it clear earlier that I do not regard majority rule as an end but merely as a means, or perhaps even as the least evil of those forms of government from which we have to choose. But I believe that the conservatives deceive themselves when they blame the evils of our time on democracy. The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power. The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite.

64. The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

65. A very clever man though perhaps not a very strong character.

66. Some people read because they are too lazy to think.

67. Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede - not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

68. We may use Lichtenberg's writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden.

69. To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.

70. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting.

71. Then there are all those people in the space program. Nas-holes, I call them.

72. In this fool's paradise he drank delight.

73. What you have witnessed since Christopher Hitchens's opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq] is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug.

74. Pipe down Mr Indignation. We'll see what the viewers thought of your double standards, your indignation about me and the aplomb with which you become a lying plutocrat in your gentleman's club.

75. At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him - home-spun cloth, 'soul forces' and vegetarianism - were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country.

76. This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare.

77. His poor marksmanship must be taken into account. We have just won the most terrible war in history, yet here is a Frenchman who misses his target 6 out of 7 times at point-blank range. Of course, this fellow must be punished for the careless use of a dangerous weapon and for poor marksmanship. I suggest that he be locked up for eight years, with intensive training in a shooting gallery.

78. The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.

79. According to The American Chesterton Society, this quotation is actually a John F. Kennedy paraphrase of a passage from The Thing (1929), and goes like this: 'In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

80. Monsieur Wagner a de beaux moments, mais de mauvais quart d'heures.

81. Rossini, in music, is the genius of sheer animal spirits. It is a species as inferior to that of Mozart, as the cleverness of a smart boy is to that of a man of sentiment; but it is genius nevertheless.

82. Pray, O pray to God, dear friends, if you are not already asses - that he will cause you to become asses... There is none who praiseth not the golden age when men were asses: they knew not how to work the land. One knew not how to dominate another, one understood no more than another; caves and caverns were their refuge; they were not so well covered nor so jealous nor were they confections of lust and of greed. Everything was held in common.

83. Nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit!

84. 'Crap,' said Janet. 'He was a whinger and he wrote it down. That's not poetry.'

85. I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.

86. If the current polls are reliable... Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it - that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

87. Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the cliches of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.

88. in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world (83.10-12)

89. [F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.

90. For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.

91. The Republicans are calling [this] a Wizard of Oz ticket... Cheney needs a heart, Bush needs a brain.

92. Joachim von Ribbentrop is like a man of wood.

93. A foreign minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy.

94. Need one comment on that fool? He is not a foreign minister but a blind adherent of Hitler. He is also personally disagreeable and vain.

95. Winona Ryder wouldn't shoplift this!

96. Eleven dead bodies. One dead cat. No breasts.

97. Geraldine: I'm quite sane! Rance: Pull yourself together. Why have you been certified if you're sane? Even for a madwoman you're unusually dense.

98. Dr. Kettle was wont to say that Seneca writes as a Boare does pisse, scilicet by jirkes.

99. Now cheaply bought for thrice their weight in gold.

100. Odyous of olde been comparisonis.