Quotes About Critique

We're all generous, but with different things, like time, money, talent -- criticism.

It's sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That's the level where I want to go.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry — all of the past you read is usually quite great — but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

Yet at the same time humans are inherently irreverent. It was Saint Bonaventura, a thirteenth-century theologian, who said, "The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind." We love to make fun of the higher-ups. We're always ready to bring them down. And the powerful know this all too well. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," as Shakespeare wrote.

Self-criticism has been much talked about recently, but few realize that it was first of all an African institution.

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

Televisio is a vehicle that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.

Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

I don't want to make people mad. I just... well, how can people get better if you don't tell them what you honestly think?

They practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate.

The teachings of Zen have been deployed in opposition to both religious fundamentalism and anti religious secularism. They have also been used to critique consumerism, technological destruction of and alienation from nature, and other perceived ills of the dominant and domineering worldviews and lifestyles of the modern West. All of this is now part of the ongoing development of Zen as a living and increasingly cross-cultural tradition.

I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialoge? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. ...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Religion is the Venereal Disease of Mankind.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race

This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art…

With all your brag and boasting, where has your Christianity succeeded without the sword? Yours is a religion preached in the name of luxury. It is all hypocrisy that I have heard in this country. All this prosperity, all this from Christ! Those who call upon Christ care nothing but to amass riches! Christ would not find a stone on which to lay his head among you … You are not Christians. Return to Christ!

Dondequiera que fuese fomentaba la discordia: no porque fuera idealista, sino porque era como un reflector que revelaba la estupidez y futilidad de todo.

Beauty and the Beast seemed like it all was really brown. The whole thing was just so brown and orange and yellow, like Burger King or something. I don't think I would have liked Beauty and the Beast at any age.

I wasn't used to people critiquing how I looked. And then always hearing, 'God she looks like Ric Flair.' Yes, he's my dad. Who am I supposed to look like? I took it so serious and to heart.

I didn't enjoy 'Topographic Oceans' at all. It was a double album, and the truth is it was padded out, and I didn't like that. But I was a fan of Yes - still am - and as such, I'm entitled to say what I think.