“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”
Billy Wilder (1906–2002) American filmmaker
“There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.”
Lecture at Brooklyn College, as quoted in The New York Times (20 November 1984)
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Stephen Spender76
English poet and man of letters 1909–1995Related quotes
“Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.”
Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer
As quoted in The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A search for Salvation (2007) by Shafique N. Virani, p. 28
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer
The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy (1916)
Misc. Quotes
Context: It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
Kenneth D. Mackenzie (1937) American management consultant
Kenneth D. Mackenzie (1986), Organizational design: the organizational audit and analysis technology. p. 154
τίς ὸμφαλητόμος σε τὸν διοπλῆγα
ἔψησε κἀπέλουσεν ἀσκαρίζοντα
Attributed by Aelius Herodianus (fl. 2nd c. CE), 'On Inflections'; as cited by Douglas Gerber, Greek Iambic Poetry, Loeb Classical Library (1999), page 367.
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator
Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 9, p. 197