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Quotes by Critic

"Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go."

"Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do."

"If I despised myself, it would be no compensation if everyone saluted me, and if I respect myself, it does not trouble me if others hold me lightly."

"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes."

"The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation."

"Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong."

"Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that."


"Fascism is not the result of dictatorship."

"Television is now the dominant factor in the lives of too many American children."

"Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth."

"In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste."

"I am convinced that when the history of international law comes to be written centuries hence, it will be divided into two periods: the first being from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century, and the second beginning with the Hague Conference."

"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal."

"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."

"I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly."

"I'm very grateful to Jennifer Lopez, because I have something to talk about for the last couple of years."

"If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen."

"Never claim as a right what you can ask as a favor."

"What I learned from this movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights: Absitenence can be a very good thing. Especially from box offices where this film is playing."
Film,

"All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is."

"Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it."

"In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us."

"Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us."

"Conservative voters increasingly understand that the one legacy a president can leave is his judicial appointments."

"By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested."
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