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Criticism Quotes
"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."
49
"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."
48
"There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep."
47
"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."
45
"I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits."
45
"Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me."
45
"The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon."
45
"My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily."
45
"Sandwich every bit of criticism between two layers of praise."
43
"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."
43
"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."
42
"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."
42
"The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem."
42
"There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism."
42
"It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism."
42
"Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive."
41
"The most destructive criticism is indifference."
41
"The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit."
40
"You have to laugh, you have to be able to take criticism."
40
"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."
40
"To what derision should I be exposed from a thousand quarters!- An unlearned female entering the lists of criticism against the mighty Johnson!"
40
"Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type . . ."
39
"You could put on monkeys jumping up and down and get bigger numbers than MSNBC."
38
"Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him."
38
"I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species."
38
"I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan."
38
"Silence is sometimes the severest criticism."
37
"I do know dumb-ass questions when I see dumb-ass questions."
37
"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."
37
"The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors."
37
"Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me."
36
"I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films."
36
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