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Exlpore more Criticism quotes
"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?"
"The most destructive criticism is indifference."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Goldwin Smith
"The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength."
"But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him."
"We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself."
"No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest."
"Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?"
"The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation."
"Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God."
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