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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
"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 Kenzaburo Oe
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."
"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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