“We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.”

— Kingsley Amis

"Phoenix Too Frequent" Critique of D. H. Lawrence
What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970)

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Kingsley Amis 32

English novelist, poet, critic, teacher 1922–1995

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

“Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification.”

Peter Sellers (1925–1980) British film actor, comedian and singer

Statement (September 1961), as quoted in Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers (1999) by Ed Sikov, p. 168
Context: Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how.

“Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Outside

Outside (1955)

“Literary critics like Lionel Trilling … demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 214.

“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Source: A Woman of No Importance

“The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 143

“It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

Source: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Volume 1, 1976, p. 68.

“An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Forward to Integral Medicine: A Noetic Reader (2003) edited by Marilyn Schlitz & Tina Hyman http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/integral-med-1.cfm
Unsourced variant: I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.
Context: An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.

“Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

The Gorky Incident (1906)

“In writing this book, I hope I have offered some guidance to those—the young especially—trying to articulate their objections to our way of life. However, this is not enough. As citizens of a free society, we have a duty to look critically at our world. But if we think we know what is wrong, we must act upon that knowledge. Philosophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Conclusion: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

“We should be wrong to demand that a critic must stay on the point all the time; it is enough if he remains in orbit around it.”

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