497 Critique Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Cancer research is a growth industry.

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

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.

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

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.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

No wild beasts are so dangerous to men as Christians are to one another.

Kate journeys into new and exciting territories. She is an original in a music world dominated by cover versions, regressive movements and identikit superstars. The direct opposite of the archetypal rock star: compulsively introvert in a world of screaming extraverts, middle-class and deeply English amid England's all-pervasive working class American ethos, boldly feminine in rock's macho climate. Her melodic genius and articulate lyrics make the rest seem moronically simplistic.

The new heroism - put a village idiot into a pressure cooker, seal it up tight, and shoot him at the moon.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show.

'Rich men say that happiness is a million dollar bills, so how come half of them OD on sleeping pills?' - From 'No Voices in the Sky'

:modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.

I was in high school (oh, I told you - that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you - when you were too big for the Kiddie Kokoons and too young to go out an' hafta assume what we used to call Manhood, which involved going at the same time every day to some weird building and doing some totally useless shit for hours on end just so you could get some bread and have everybody respect you).

The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the 'superstar,' and that's a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it's the very virus that's fucking up rock, a subspecies of the virus I spoke of earlier that infests our culture from popstars to politics.

You see, dear reader, so much of what's doled out as punk merely amounts to saying I suck, you suck, the world sucks, and who gives a damn - which is, er, ah, somehow insufficient. Don't ask me why; I'm just an observer, really. But any observer could tell that, to put in in terms of Us vs. Them, saying the above is exactly what They would want you to do, because it amounts to capitulation.

The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say - out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami - they'll say, 'God saved me.' As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. ... All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance - I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church - they wanted the rapture to come. ... We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around.

'So much for that line of reasoning, Lord Richars,' Ekaterin finished. She sat back with a hand-dusting gesture, and added, by no means under her breath, 'Twit'

Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!

His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentful of his tittering.

I could find no explanation worthy of the Mahatma for his decision to accept leadership of the khilafat movement. The decision, it seemed to me, revealed the great man's proverbial Achilles' heel.

There are two modes of criticism. One which ... crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drouth. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

A pity she did not understand them!

France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.

But whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist.

I said, `Now, wait a minute, so you're telling me you want this fish who lives in a fish tank in a dentist's office to be a fictitious character from an NBC sitcom?' I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. It's like, why would you want Mickey Mouse to be the lead in the `House of the Seven Gables' or something.

'Kant ought to be arrested and given three years in Solovki asylum for that 'proof' of his!' Ivan Nikolayich burst out completely unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' whispered Berlioz, embarrassed. But the suggestion to pack Kant off to an asylum not only did not surprise the stranger but actually delighted him. 'Exactly, exactly!' he cried and his green left eye, turned on Berlioz glittered. 'That's exactly the place for him! I said to him myself that morning at breakfast: 'If you'll forgive me, professor, your theory is no good. It may be clever but it's horribly incomprehensible. People will think you're mad.'' Berlioz's eyes bulged. At breakfast...to Kant?

'He plays like somebody is standing on his foot.'

'Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth.'

I don't give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. He's not running for re-election!

L'amour, tel qu'il existe dans la societe, n'est que l'echange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux epidermes.

A lot of the people who call themselves Left I would regard as proto-fascists.

Strikingly, no concern was voiced over the glaringly obvious fact that no official reason was ever offered for going to war -- no reason, that is, that could not be instantly refuted by a literate teenager.

The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious distortions and misstatements of fact. --Samuel Huntington, February 1970 [209]

Here's a man who says that Washington is incurably sinful but offers no, there's no complexity, no problem, no moral dilemmas in the book. Everything really that those in power do is seen as essentially and necessarily wrong, while public opinion is deemed to be faultless. --Adam Roberts, May 15, 2006 [230]

Chomsky's triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the actual empirical results that he can point to. --Frederick Newmeyer, 2003 [273]

Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life.

But you can't emphasize 'beef', that's like his wanting me to emphasize 'in' before 'July'! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!

Gauguin's work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values of bourgeois society and of a machine civilization. His gesture had its sordid side, but retrospectively it seems to have been appropriate, coming at a time when the world was preparing for annihilating wars. It was not a useful example: we cannot all go and live on South Sea islands, and, as I have said before in this connection, modern man carries his civilization like a pack on his back, and cannot cast if off. But he can nevertheless protest against the burden, and state the real values of life. So Gauguin did, in paintings that are symbols of eternal truths, images of great beauty and serenity.

Republicans always pull down the shades though there is seldom a reason. Democrats never pull down the shades though they always should.

The monkeys stand for honesty, Giraffes are insincere, And the elephants are kindly but They're dumb. Orangutans are skeptical Of changes in their cages, And the zookeeper is very fond of rum.

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled by its deformity to screen With flimsy veil of justice and of right Its unattractive lineaments that scare All save the brood of ignorance; at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness; With heart impassive by more noble powers Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable being, Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.

It is important to observe that the author of the Christian system had a conception widely differing from the gross imaginations of the vulgar relatively to the ruling Power of the universe. He everywhere represents this Power as something mysteriously and illimitably pervading the frame of things. Nor do his doctrines practically assume any proposition which they theoretically deny. They do not represent God as a limitless and inconceivable mystery; affirming, at the same time, his existence as a Being subject to passion...

Delibes' rich score for Sylvia led Tchaikovsky to declare that Swan Lake was 'poor stuff in comparison'.

We know from many experiences that this is what the work of art does: its life - in which we have shared the alien existences both of this world and of that different world to which the work of art alone gives us access - unwillingly accuses our lives.

You had no taste when you married me.

The old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Cobden condemned it harshly, just like Senator Robert Byrd condemns what's going on today. The real conservatives are different from the ones that call themselves that.

It's very difficult to have a call to jihad, with a mouthful of peanut butter.

This fellow they've nominated claims he's the new Thomas Jefferson. Well let me tell you something; I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine and Governor... You're no Thomas Jefferson!'

A glittering jewel of colossal ignorance.

A harmless, lovable little fuzz ball.

If women were good, God would have one.

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man.

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse.[2]

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.[2]

It is imperative that we begin speaking plainly about the absurdity of most of our religious beliefs.[2]

'The Problem with Atheism' (2007)[7]

Mr. Harris argues cogently, pithily, wittily, passionately, that religious 'faith' is leading humanity straight to a very earthly hell.

Cold approbation gave the ling'ring bays, For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise.

'Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.' [16]

Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud - or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories.

Simon Amstell: So Penny, you used to do a fashion column for the Daily Mail, didn't you? Penny Smith: Yes I've done many strange things in my time. Simon Amstell: So what does one wear to a lynching?

Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the Idea's of Plato, falls upon one himself: for his summum bonum, is a Chimera, and there is no such thing as his Felicity.

The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled. Twit.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was able to reason.