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.

'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.

[Gould's] historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers.: In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma.

The power of Gould's analysis lies in his focus on particulars. Rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims.

In Reading [England] there is this thing called the IDR, short for 'Inner Distribution Road', which is bureaucratese for 'Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently'. It's a 2-3 lane dual carriageway that goes round the town centre. It has lots of roundabouts, an overhead section, a couple of spare motorway-like exits (that's British motorways -- y'know, the roundabout with the main road going under it), and a thing called the Watlington Street Gyratory, where you have to get in lane for your intended destination about three years and two corners before you get there with no signposting. I used to cycle along it every day to get to school, before I fell off at 35 mph. [Kids! Don't try this at home!] I know it well. I believe it is impossible to leave Reading heading west.

Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there's no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set it Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...

Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, 'This is a good bacon sandwich,' or, 'Bedser had a good wicket.'

I have always said this of Tony: he immatures with age.

Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.

I was only abused by lawyers twice in my life - once when I was sued by one and once when I hired one.

There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.

The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave old England's winding sheet.

Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of drunkard's eye.

There's a lot of bastards out there!

'Raleigh Was Right' (1940) from Collected Later Poems (1950)

He has one gift most dangerous to a spectator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import.

The defects of his strength grow on him. All black is very black, all white very white.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Civilisation had been restored to the Island. But now the political fabric which nurtured it was about to be overthrown. Hitherto strong men armed had kept the house. Now a child, a weakling, a vacillator, a faithless, feckless creature, succeeded to the warriour throne.

Sonja: 'Violence is justified in the service of mankind!' Boris: Who said that? Sonja: Attila the Hun! Boris: You're quoting a Hun to me?

Yogi's teacher You don't know anything, do you Berra?

'See right through the red, white and blue disguise'

After he had gone over the mansion, his entertainer asked him what he thought of the splendours it contained; and he in reply did full justice to the riches of its owner and the skill of its decorators, but he added, 'Lions would have fared better, had lions been the artists.'

Can someone translate this from English to Russian for me? Where is the Siberian cultural museum? I would like to see your wonderful prison systems.

Too much chicken soup for the soul is not a good thing. Working men eat meat and potatoes.

Dicko: I thought you sung a dismal song really well. You said it was a challenge for you. It was a challenge for me to listen to it cause I just couldn't follow it. I wanted to party tonight. I thought there were some great songs and that was just a bit of a speed bump in the evening for me and it's a shame cause I think you are growing. I wanted you to tear it up tonight and I think the song weighed you down but I thought you delivered it well.

Mark: I constantly admire your strength but I don't know - I heard pitching problems.

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.

Dicko: Great pitch and great vocally but you have problems with movement. There was also a breakdown point where you could have gained everyone but you didn't. Vocally very strong.

Mark: That was the best you could do.

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

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

'Clay, I think this is the third pop idol, or American idol have done, if you include the english one. Probably one of the best performance I've ever heard through the entire competition. - Simon Cowell on 'To Love Somebody' -

Teenage girls with no life experiences and boys who call themselves punk are on my radio singing about how much pain they've endured and how hard their lives are

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.

B-U-Y Centennial Sell 'em pre-canned laughter America Perennial Sing happy ever after

The Benthamic standard of 'the greatest happiness' was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like 'the law of nature,' 'right reason,' 'the moral sense,' 'natural rectitude,' and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.

Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude (of the others). Feuerbach's great achievement is: (1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of 'man to man' the basic principle of the theory; (3) His opposing of the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.

Are you infected with the same disease of lust, gluttony and greed? Then watch the ones with the biggest smiles The idle jabbers...Cuz they're the backstabbers ~Money

Ignorance of people purchasing diamonds and necklaces And barely able to keep the payments up on their lessons and enrolled in a class and don't know who the professor is how low people go for the dough and make a mess of things?* ~ Shout

It's a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky's tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy. What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: 'The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.' He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights. --Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005 [191]

Whoever set up the universe, it really sucks. If you ever get around to making another one, change the rules a little. Lighten up on your creatures. Give us a break now and then

This is your obsession, he's your god, you do it

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

'It's like he swallowed a roll of sandpaper' - Anon boy 2008

Pardon my thug poetry, but suckers is born everyday/and fear of man grow on trees

Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!

Well, another program proving absolutely nothing. Proving that UFOs don't exist, that there isn't an extra dimension and there are no flying saucers or little green men. Yes, another Coast to Coast AM that can't prove a freaking thing.

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.

This world is bullshit. And just because I appear in music video wherein I am in my underwear, and make young women feel not good enough so that they become anorxeic; and okay, maybe because of that I became popular more quickly than other singers who are, I don't know, maybe more talented or better songwriters. That doesn't matter because, and ... um ... my boyfriend is a magician, and he can pull a quarter out of your ear and say things like 'We have not met before have we?' Go with yourself.