Quotes About Critique

One of the things that drive the various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative.

What is it the Bible teaches us? — repine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.

I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.

the person they call Jesus Christ; begotten, they say, by a ghost, whom they call holy, on the body of a woman engaged in marriage, and afterwards married, whom they call a virgin, seven hundred years after this foolish story was told; a theory which, speaking for myself, I hesitate not to believe

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals; but, however unwilling the partisans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.

To Jacob the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That's why he didn't read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.

To Jacob, the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That's why he didn't read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.

In a final flourish, drawing on his extensive knowledge of avian anatomy, he presents a critique of the supposed morphology of divine beings: "If angels had any reality, they would be very clumsy and awkward fliers with a slow heavy flight, lacking as they are in aerodynamic shape.

I wouldn't know a good script if it bit me in the face.

There's no question in my mind that I think I would have been a better president than Barack Obama has been.

You can find flaws in Agassi and Sampras, but Federer has none.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Normally I sit there in the films really hating watching myself. Loving watching the films, hating watching myself.

Normally, 'Saturday Night Live' is about as entertaining as an ocular migraine.

There's a lot of crappy music that people like, you know, all over the world, and Norway is definitely not an exception.

You know, I'm really not interested in someone telling me that something's good or bad.

If someone comes and tells me I've done great work, that's not what I want to hear. But if someone comes and tells me that this could have been a notch better, I'd spend an hour with the person and hear him or her out.

We weren't big 'Notebook' fans or anything.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can watch 'Presumed Innocent' again and again, and I will always be bothered by the same things that will never bother anybody else.