Quotes About Critique

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge.

In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.

Siskel's classic question, "Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.

I was reminded of the child prodigy who was summoned to perform for a famous pianist. The child climbed into the piano stool and played something by Chopin with great speed and accuracy. When the child had finished, the great musician patted it on the head and said, "You can play the notes. Someday, you may be able to play the music." Puppet

I am not an advocate of Enlightenment. On the contrary, I see it as a form of light pollution, which prevents us from seeing the stars.

He describes a particular faculty, reason, in its illegitimate employment; he also demolishes all the claims to knowledge that this faculty tempts us to make.

To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating "collective representations" as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature.

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

Rockefeller could brush off Tarbell's critique of his business methods as biased, but he was deeply pained by the character study.

The intimacy of this group of nationalists allowed the talks to range far beyond commercial disputes to a richer, more trenchant critique of the crumbling Articles of Confederation.

He now subjected the Articles of Confederation to a searching critique. He thought the sovereignty of the states only enfeebled the union.

Parades always made me cringe—the sight of so many people lockstepping along, chests out, elbows pumping, seemed to denote an unearned pride or a humiliating need for attention. I have generally found something else to do, if any parades were nearby.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

But I must say, if you could vulgarize what Nietzsche says you [would] arrive at what is going on all the time in the social sciences: the destruction of the whole, of every possibility of distinguishing responsibly between high and low, good and bad.

Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years," and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, "That's exactly what I mean about wasting your time.

If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other.

I don't know if you've noticed, but our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking at itself in the mirror.

Don't interrupt. I'm going to tell you all your flaws.

Dreiser's literary faults, it gives us to understand, are essentially social and political virtues.

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.