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Critique Quotes
"When you begin to expect miracles, Jesus feels insulted."
26
"Another very important aspect of the Protestant teachings is that money is simply a by-product, a natural consequence, a compensation, it is never the goal."
24
"The miracle centered gospel leads to getting something from nothing mentality."
20
"Our streets are littered with university graduates holding paper certificates and looking for a way to enslave themselves again under a boss in the name of looking for a job."
18
"What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal."
15
"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."
15
"There is more evil than good when we preach the miracle centered gospel instead of the kingdom gospel."
10
"People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.' 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind."
10
"Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion."
9
"Philosophy can make people sick."
9
"The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard."
8
"Some lurid things have been said about me-that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth-that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin."
8
"God of blind believers is most likely to be cock-eyed."
8
"We know of no spectacle more ridiculous-or more contemptible-than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth."
8
"All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth."
7
"Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind."
7
"Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me the most. I distrust extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who from such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner."
7
"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly."
7
"Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow...But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don't care what happens down the road and you don't care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it's not my problem."
7
"In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of WH Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality, and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the coloured peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals-and managed, in a transparent and unique way, to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry (though he never did get over his aversion to 'pansies')."
7
"In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you've taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself is that it's purpose? No it's not. It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It's pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices."
7
"Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker."
6
"When our gospel promotes too much miracles, we are telling people that it is normal for them to expect something from nothing."
6
"Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them."
6
"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits-a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
6
"The 19thc hatred of Realism is Caliban's enraged reaction to seeing his own face in the mirror. The 19thc rejection of Romanticism is Caliban's fury at not seeing his face reflected in the mirror."
6
"Miss Austen's novels - seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer - is marriageableness."
5
"The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity."
5
"How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different."
5
"There is more evil than good when we preach the miracle centered gospel instead if the kingdom gospel."
4
"Miracle centered gospels cripple the present and generations to come."
4
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
4
"When you begin to run after miracles, Jesus feels insulted."
4
"I never have sympathy for those that have been blinded by the path of God. You chose to walk into the light, not realizing that you were already chained within the darkness. When a hand was offered to you, you looked up into the sky, and bowed your head in blind obedience, when you should have been creating a new possibility. Nothing is more pathetic than to see ignorance in action. Nothing is more laughable than to see the obedient ask an illusion for more power to stay frivolously obedient. I never have sympathy for those that have been blinded by the path of God. I only have sympathy for the Devil..."
4
"A cowardly critique starts with a compliment."
3
"The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string."
3
"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."
3
"Bullshit french post-war rationalizing."
3
"Most board meetings amount to little more than intellectual masturbation. They are ideas that cause thrills, chills, and satisfaction, but there is no impregnation. Nothing is ever born of them. It's intellectual masturbation."
2
"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."
1
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