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Quotes by Critic
"The more worrying feature of the new global corporate structures is their capacity to devastate national labour markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas."
52
"Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."
52
"Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle."
52
"He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest."
52
"Silence is one great art of conversation."
52
"Silly sitcoms are designed to attract juveniles of all ages."
52
"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."
52
"On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not."
52
"The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours."
52
"Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving."
52
"It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance."
51
"We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia."
51
"Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death."
51
"I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness."
51
"The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
51
"The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages."
51
"Those only deserve a monument who do not need one."
51
"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
51
"Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold."
51
"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
50
"If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West."
50
"The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it."
50
"In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless."
50
"But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality."
50
"Advancing the notion that there can be many "feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term "power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose."
50
"Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written."
49
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
49
"Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type."
49
"To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it."
49
"As I've said many times, the single most oppressed class in America right now is the teenager."
49
"White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others."
49
"When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture."
49
"A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses."
49
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