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"So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism."
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"He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals."

"Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell."

"Learn to brush off criticism as easily as you brush aside hollow compliments."

"Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?"

"People have boldness to criticize but not to sensitize."

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

"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."

"At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you."
Explore more quotes by E. M. Forster

"Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out."

"It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them; men can always be more unconventional than women, and a bachelor of independent means need encounter no difficulties at all."

"People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness."

"Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong."
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