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"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic."
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Exlpore more Criticism quotes
"When I see the promotion of nighttime street lighting to the masses, I realize the great level of incompetence that is present in governments, human health and the biological effects of light."
"The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot."
"At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you."
"People have boldness to criticize but not to sensitize."
"For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker."
"There is no such thing as constructive criticism. There is constructive advice, constructive guidance, constructive counsel, encouragement, suggestion, and instruction. Criticism, however, is not constructive but a destructive means of faultfinding that cripples all parties involved. Don't be fooled into thinking otherwise."
"There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism."
"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."
"Plenty of people will think you're crazy, no matter what you do. Don't let that stop you from finding the people who think you're incredible-the ones who need to hear your voice, because it reminds them of their own. Your tribe. They're out there. Don't let your critics interfere with your search for them."
Explore more quotes by Kenzaburo Oe
"Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries."
"The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."
"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."
"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."
"After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution."
"My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity."
"In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad."
"From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."
"Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters."
"As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century."
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