Quotes About Critics

Over the past sixty years a rather impressive assembly of respectable taxonomists and evolutionary biologists have tried to unseat the biological species concept for a wide variety of reasons. Most of them failed, probably because Ernst Mayr is alive, adroit, and articulate at ninety-six years young as I write these words, and most critics are no match for him.

So now that the pretense of neutrality has been more or less abandoned, and is on its way to being forgotten, what is the substance of the perspective (or ideology or, perhaps, religion) that is now fully exposed to view—and not merely to the view of its critics? And what shall we call it? In the book you are now reading, Steven Smith sets for himself the task of describing and analyzing it, and he gives it a name: paganism.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.

There's a small group of people always watching me to make sure I'm still offending.

The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics.

I guess you'd have to say that sometimes the audience is smarter than the critics.

In the earliest days, make-up and moralising were intertwined. The 'cosmetic slops and washes' of the 17th and 18th centuries aimed to smooth complexions and revive a woman's 'bloom' - but their critics were never far behind.

We shared the same fears as kids - snakes and clowns. Now we also have more adult fears, like television critics.

To take those risks not only do you need to silence the external critics, you also need to let go of the inner critic that tries to worry you about the fear of rejection.

ready for prime time. Never mind his immense popularity, a recent Grammy for best pop album, or a concert tour that grossed $ 72.4 million. For critics, the

Rappers are emotional. Critics be reviewin me. But I got love for everybody even if you're suin me.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they're winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks.

If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.

Many pointed out that celibacy, although valued from the earliest days of Christianity and first mandated in the fourth century, was widely enforced only starting in the twelfth century. Defenders of celibacy have described it as a gift, a charism, a witness to sanctity. But critics have noted that celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.

Whatever my critics say, I've been a hard-core journalist all my career.

Judgment is very easy, but I think, on the whole, professional critics maybe see too much, and compare too much, and forget the joy of actually looking and contemplating for its own sake.

Science fiction is not a genre that has much respect in China. Critics have long been discouraged from paying attention to the category, dismissed as a branch of juvenile literature.

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it.

In London, the food critics are harsher, the clients milder; in Hong Kong, the clients are harsher, the critics milder.

An artist is usually responsible only for the creation of a particular art. It's up to the critics to label it.