Quotes About Criticism

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

There are two modes of establishing our reputation: to be praised by honest men, and to be abused by rogues.

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you, with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critic on the last. —Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

I watched her perform on the Grammys and she totally sucked. The song 'All I Want to Do is Have Some Fun' sucks and when she walked out of that place with all those Grammies I knew I was going to give mine away. I did. If they're giving them away for crap, I don't want one in my place. What an insult to real music and musicians everywhere.

People that you thought were your friends give you shit about working hard. All I know is that we play hard and a lot of this shit is not fun. Playing is great but the way we live is not the life of a rockstar.

I love the hate mail I get, the unsigned, misspelled letters telling me to go back to Russia or whatever.

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a but.

it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

No teško je nezadovoljnu ?ovjeku da ne kori bilo koga drugoga, i to upravo onoga tko mu je najbliži, za ono zbog ?ega je nezadovoljan.

Only during a period of war does it become obvious how millions of people can be manipulated. People, millions of people, are filled with pride while doing things which those same people actually consider stupid, evil, dangerous, painful, and criminal, and they strongly criticize these things—but continue doing them.

She doesn't stand up because her legs are too short. She's a very bad figure.

I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life;

One who pays too much attention to what other people say about him will never find peace.

Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.

But instead of all that, here he was—the rich husband of an unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, who liked to eat, drink, and, unbuttoning himself, to denounce the government a little, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universally beloved member of Moscow society.

That's how it's always done with us, all the wrong way round!' the Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino, just as people speak now, letting it be felt that some fool somewhere does things that way, the wrong way round, but we would not do things that way. But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about or are deliberately deceiving themselves.

Noticing other people's faults arises from dissatisfaction with ourselves. Often, in criticizing our neighbour, we fall into making the same error for which we have just criticized someone else. Those people who are not concerned about the salvation of their soul and who do not attempt to improve themselves can easily fall into temptation and be seduced into following the example of others. From Pious Thoughts

quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.

It was necessary that throughout this mass should be scattered workers who had thought over the experience of 1905, criticised the constitutional illusions of the liberals and Mensheviks, assimilated the perspectives of the revolution, meditated hundreds of times about the question of the army, watched attentively what was going on in its midst-workers capable of making revolutionary inferences from what they observed and communicating them to others.