Quotes About Criticism

detraction. He made his living by slander and

there is nothing so brittle as someone else's perfection.

Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.

Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for errora partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.

If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.

Bush Sr. was a jerk, Quayle an idiot, Clinton was atrocious and disgusting, most of those who persecuted him were hypocritical, Gore is shallow and weak, Bradley is an idealist, Bush Jr. a fool, and all of the independent candidates act like they're on drugs.

Reciprocal accountability, or criticism [is] the only known antidote to error.

As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal verities' on which literature graduates base their doctoral dissertations. Literature departments were uncomfortable with that. But things change.

As it concerns Clinton coverage, the Times will have a special place in journalism hell.

The visible structure of Jane Austen's stories may be flimsy enough; but their foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considers as Hardy's.

You did not get a very good review from Dr. Trinh," he wrote. "She was very quick to contact me and to let me know that I should stay away from you because you obviously wanted to do damage to the memory of our dearest Celestine. She also said that she did not feel that you were very intelligent, or maybe you were just American, she's not sure...

When the Bible is viewed primarily as a collection of devotional thoughts, its status as the most devastating work of social criticism in history is forgotten.

used to put movies down by saying that they were 'deep on the surface' --meaning that there was nothing underneath.

objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our 'wall'.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first). That is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation. Thus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they can be tested by experience – by observation or experiment