top of page
.png){kind=small}
Criticism Quotes
"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."
8
"The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem."
8
"Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite."
8
"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."
8
"Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive."
8
"I doubt you can understand the magnitude of the stupidity in your statement."
8
"We need to be calling out the flaws and misguided decisions of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration."
8
"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."
8
"The most destructive criticism is indifference."
8
"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."
8
"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 ."
8
"Why is it we never get our bad medicine in small doses?"
7
"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."
7
"It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not."
7
"I much prefer a compliment, even if insincere, to sincere criticism."
7
"We cannot let our respect for the FBI blind us from the fact the FBI has sometimes come up short of our expectations."
7
"Silence is sometimes the severest criticism."
7
"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."
7
"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick."
7
"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."
7
"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise."
6
"It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds."
6
"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."
6
"The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic."
6
"You have to laugh, you have to be able to take criticism."
6
"Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism."
6
"I do know dumb-ass questions when I see dumb-ass questions."
6
"You hear about how many fourth quarter comebacks that a guy has and I think it means a guy screwed up in the first three quarters."
6
"I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan."
6
"It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism."
6
"...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."
6
bottom of page