top of page
.png){kind=small}
Criticism Quotes
"We need to be calling out the flaws and misguided decisions of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration."
14
"A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law."
14
"I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits."
13
"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic."
13
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
13
"I'd call it a new version of voodoo economics, but I'm afraid that would give witch doctors a bad name."
13
"I much prefer a compliment, even if insincere, to sincere criticism."
13
"Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive."
13
"I do know dumb-ass questions when I see dumb-ass questions."
13
"Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that."
13
"You have to laugh, you have to be able to take criticism."
12
"The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem."
12
"Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me."
12
"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."
12
"Silence is sometimes the severest criticism."
12
"A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."
12
"It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism."
12
"The most destructive criticism is indifference."
12
"Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it's really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it's really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on."
12
"The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it."
10
"There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism."
10
"I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan."
10
"I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement."
10
"To what derision should I be exposed from a thousand quarters!- An unlearned female entering the lists of criticism against the mighty Johnson!"
10
"You could put on monkeys jumping up and down and get bigger numbers than MSNBC."
9
"Why is it we never get our bad medicine in small doses?"
9
"For years Don Imus was just - boy, he was merciless in his criticism of me. Maybe it was justified, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt."
9
"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."
9
"It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not."
9
"Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism."
9
"...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."
9
"But as the Pope has a long arm, which might reach me in France, I have gone a little out of the way to tell him the plain truths contained in these pages."
9
"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise."
8
bottom of page