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Criticism Quotes
"You just never give up, no matter how hard the challenges are, and observe this world with a healthy dose of criticism and don't just follow the herd like somebody else might do."
111
"Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."
111
"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism."
71
"If you keep your feathers well oiled the water of criticism will run off as from a duck's back."
62
"I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist."
54
"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."
53
"So as an amateur Olympic competitor I loved criticism, because it made me better. But now as a professional I don't really know how to channel it or where to take it, so I don't take it quite as well."
53
"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass."
51
"As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism."
50
"I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me."
49
"I am not even an atheist so much as an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually true.... There may be people who wish to live their lives under cradle-to-grave divine supervision, a permanent surveillance and monitoring. But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque."
49
"The devil's happy when the critics run you off."
49
"Criticism, even when you try to ignore it, can hurt. I have cried over many articles written about me, but I move on and I don't hold on to that ."
49
"Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite."
48
"Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television."
48
"I have the worst ear for criticism; even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle who says she doesn't like blue."
47
"I mean no film is beyond criticism, but I think we've made a very modest movie."
47
"Anytime you put a movie out it's subject to such scrutiny and such criticism."
46
"Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings."
45
"I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language."
45
"Whoever looks at America will see: the ship is powered by stupidity, corruption, or prejudice."
44
"Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down."
42
"Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more."
41
"I much prefer a compliment, even if insincere, to sincere criticism."
41
"We cannot let our respect for the FBI blind us from the fact the FBI has sometimes come up short of our expectations."
41
"Why is it we never get our bad medicine in small doses?"
40
"One of the things that upset me was some of the criticism leveled at Simon and Garfunkel. I always took exception to it, but actually I agree with a lot of it."
40
"I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement."
40
"She likes herself, yet others hates, For that which in herself she prizes; And while she laughs at them, forgets She is the thing that she despises."
40
"To silence criticism is to silence freedom."
39
"I'd call it a new version of voodoo economics, but I'm afraid that would give witch doctors a bad name."
39
"Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within."
39
"...it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same."
38
"The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes."
37
"We need to be calling out the flaws and misguided decisions of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration."
37
"My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily."
36
"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic."
35
"It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially - like inviting a man to dinner then spitting in his eye."
35
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