Quotes About Critique

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.

I think that all filth is local…and that a joke isn't a joke unless it's at somebody's expense

One indictment of the religious right is not that it is heartless – a tautology in any case – but that is brainless.

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets ... what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified 'white' candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

Watching and listening up close, I saw nothing to suggest that if his brains were made of TNT they would generate enough explosive power to disarrange his hair.

And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it's hello darkness my old friend.

English muffin, a confection so grim that it could not have been sold in England even in wartime.

When one has a text to question, it is irrelevant to ask the author.

La cultura è un'alternanza continua tra la libera presa di parola e la critica di questa presa di parola.

What's the book about? I must admit I haven't read it. It's over five hundred pages long, which is a mistake — any defamatory work ought to be readable in half an hour. =

Nel suo genere x'è un dio. X'è il genere che x'è merda.

What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich?

We should call on the Creator to show more modesty. He created the world in a frenzy of excitement. Instead of revising his rough drafts, he had his work printed straightaway. What a lot of contradictions there are in it. What a log of typing errors, inconsistencies in the plot, passages that are too long and wordy, characters that are entirely superfluous. But it is painful and difficult to cut and trim the living cloth of a book written and published in too much of a hurry

One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range.

If you read, you'll judge.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

The only good copies are those that point out the ridicule of bad originals.

A high place of honor, although doubtless one to be obtained only after enduring the pangs of a prolonged crucifixion, awaits that philosophical biologist, or that philosopher sufficiently acquainted with scientific biology, who subjects the modern doctrine of evolution to a thoroughly critical analysis, with a view to detect and to estimate its metaphysical assumptions.