top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Critic
"Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place."
44
"We may be willing to tell a story twice never to hear it more than once."
44
"One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness " in communities, in institutions, among friends."
44
"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words."
44
"If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism."
44
"Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal."
44
"Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world."
44
"Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!"
44
"If you fight back and get hit, it hurts a little while; if you don't fight back it hurts forever."
43
"We are going to have a huge Oscar issue, you are going to see everything in such beautiful detail."
43
"Discretion is not the better part of biography."
43
"Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can."
43
"In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something."
43
"The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion."
43
"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner."
43
"In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods."
43
"But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both."
43
"Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination."
43
"NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise."
43
"I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour."
43
"If you're running for reelection in the House of Representatives race, you know, it's very important to you that you be on fairly good terms with the local affiliates in the largest market in your area. I mean you don't want to antagonize them."
43
"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach."
43
"I keep saying the word "weird" over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it."
43
"First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so."
43
"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."
43
"The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster."
43
"Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors."
43
"It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else."
43
"The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature."
43
bottom of page