Larry King Live interview (2010)
Context: I don't hate America. I love America. I want it to be better. The only way we can get it to be better is to realistically criticize what's wrong with it. That's not what the Republicans do. … I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist. But, no, I'm not like Mitt Romney, whose book is called No Apology, the Case for American Greatness. Really? Always waving the big foam number one finger; we're not number one in most things. We're number one in military. We're number one in money. We're number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We're not number one in literacy, money spent on education. We're not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We're tenth. That's like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs.
“I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.”
As cited in Churchill By Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 128 ISBN 1586486381
Post-war years (1945–1955)
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Winston S. Churchill 601
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965Related quotes
“I've been critical of the American founding throughout my career”
Spencer interview with Dinesh D'Souza for the documentary Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?
Context: I've been critical of the American founding throughout my career.
“I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it.”
Source: Kavanagh: A Tale (1849), Chapter 30.
Context: I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for.
"The Songs of Synge: The Man Who Shaped His Life as He Shaped His Plays", in New York Morning Telegraph (18 February 1917)
“I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq.”
General Eric K. Shinseki to associates; quoted in [Thom, Shanker, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.html?_r=5&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=login, New Strategy Vindicates Ex-Army Chief Shinseki, The New York Times, January 12, 2007, 2007-01-13]
“I don't want 'constructive criticism'. I want praise.”
Cited in Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 2009.
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.