Quotes about critic
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“Candour is the brightest gem of criticism.”

Isaac D'Israeli (1766–1848) British writer

Literary Journals.
Curiosities of Literature (1791–1834)

“There is no important problem in any branch of philosophy which is not treated by Kant, and he never treated a problem without saying something illuminating and original about it. He was certainly wrong on many points of detail, and he may well be wrong in his fundamental principles; but, when all criticisms have been made, it seems to me that Kant’s failures are more important than most men’s successes.”

C. D. Broad (1887–1971) English philosopher

From Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

Men, Failure, Problem, Success

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Behavior, Reality, Effort, Universe

“In fact, their contempt for the native converts was deeper than that for their Hindu subjects. They had all along looked down upon the native converts as Ajlãf (low-born) and Arzãl (base-born) as compared to the Ashrãf (exalted) which distinctive designation they had reserved for themselves….. It was at this critical juncture that the frustrated fraternity of foreign Muslims took a very strategic step. They started swearing by a solidarity with the native Muslims whom they had despised so far. They let loose on the native Muslims an army of mercenary Mullahs recruited, mostly from their own ranks. These Mullahs went about broadcasting the message that ‘Islam was in danger’, and that ‘Hindus were out to enslave and exploit the Muslim minority’. It was in this manner that the residues of Islamic imperialism managed to ‘merge’ themselves with the native converts, and to present themselves at the head of a strong phalanx pitted against whatever historical forces threatened their unjust privileges. Hitherto, the haughty Ashrãf had stood strictly aloof from the abject Ajlãf and the despised Arzãl. Now all of a sudden the latter became the former’s ‘brothers in faith’. This was a tremendous transformation of the political scene in the second decade of the 20th century. … The British never attached more than a nuisance value to this noisy fraternity which had to be befriended or ignored according to the needs of British policy at any time. It was the national leadership which was impressed by this mobilisation of the ‘Muslim masses’ and the pathos of ‘Muslim plight’. They accepted not only separate electorates but also weightages for the ‘Muslim minority’ in many provinces.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Faith, Strong, Time

“The tremendous danger, however, contained in this totalitarian system only became abundantly clear at the moment when we were approaching the end. It was then that one could see what the meaning of the principle was, namely, that every order should be carried out without any criticism. Everything... you have seen in the way of orders which were carried out without any consideration, did after all turn out to be mistakes... This system let me put it like this to the end of the system it had become clear what tremendous dangers are contained in any such system, as such quite apart from Hitler's principle. The combination of Hitler and this system, then, brought about this tremendous catastrophe to this world.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

As quoted by chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in the closing summation of the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials on July 26, 1946

World, Way

“Modelling is a job. For girls who want to be successful it's not something they should approach lightly. You should be professional, show up on time, prepare, and earn your money. Girls should also be aware of what they're expected to do at a photo shoot in terms of nudity, since there is often that kind of pressure — especially when you're just starting out and trying to make your mark. I also tell them they have to get a thicker skin. You have to handle criticism. All that stuff. A lot of people are looking at you and judging you. That's the nature of the job.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Quoted by New Weekly, ninemsn Australia http://nw.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=600755, 19 April 2009

Money, People, Photo, Girl

“Taking again as an example the need to appear perfect, I would be interested primarily in understanding what this trend accomplishes for the individual (eliminating conflicts with others and making him feel superior to others), and also what consequences the trend has on his character and his life. The latter investigation would make it possible to understand, for example, how such a person anxiously conforms with expectations and standards to the extent of becoming a mere automaton, and yet subversively defies them; how this double play results in listlessness and inertia; how he is proud of his apparent independence, yet actually is entirely dependent on the expectations and opinions of others; how he is terrified lest anyone should discover the flimsiness of his moral strivings and the duplicity which has pervaded his life; how this in turn has made him seclusive and hypersensitive to criticism.”

Karen Horney book New Ways in Psychoanalysis

New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939) pp. 281

Life, Feeling, Understanding, Appearance

“Your Excellency's favor of the 22d was delivered to me this afternoon. I am happy to find you have wrote so fully to Congress, upon the disagreeable consequences that may follow from starving the Quarter master's department at this critical season. I wish it may have the desired effect, and rouse their attention; but I must confess I am afraid the stupor is so great, that nothing can alarm their fears, or pro mote a spirit of industry.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 April 1779)

Happiness, Fear, Season

“The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics… The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.”

Woodrow Wilson Congressional Government

Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics (1885; republished 1981), chapter 4, p. 135 (1981)
1880s

Life, Truth, Country

“Foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known." They forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Imagination, Forgetting

“Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear.”

David Brin book The Transparent Society

Source: The Transparent Society (1998), Ch. 1

Hate

“Did Stalin make mistakes? Of course he did. In so long a period filled with heroism, trials, struggle, triumphs, it is inevitable not only for Joseph Stalin personally but also for the leadership as a collective body to make mistakes. Which is the party and who is the leader that can claim to have made no mistakes in their work? When the existing leadership of the Soviet Union is criticized, the comrades of the Soviet leadership advise us to look ahead and let bygones be bygones, they tell us to avoid polemics, but when it comes to Stalin, they not only did not look ahead but they turned right round, completely backward, in order to track down only the weak spots in Stalin's work.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Speeches, Moscow Address

Personality

“Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990

“One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer "The Offshore Pirate." But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you'll like.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

On "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Personality

“The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Source: The External Control of Organizations, 1978, p. 46

“His [Diego Rivera's] supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Frida's quote On Diego Rivera, in 'Portrait of Diego' [Retrato de Diego] (22 January 1949), first published in Hoy (Mexico City) and posthumously (17 July 1955) in Novedades (Mexico City): "México en la Cultura"
1946 - 1953

Children, People, Truth, Lie

“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Understanding, Reading

“The meaning of the First Amendment has been, and will be, shaped by each American generation: by judges, political leaders, citizens. There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.… But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.”

Anthony Lewis book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

[xv, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment, Basic Books, 2007, 0465039170]

“"When I published my book "The Origins of the Bulgarians" in 1907, from which it came out that the Bulgarians were something better than what was being thought of for them, I was declared a patriot and, therefore, which is outside the law. Everyone who criticized me has criticized me not in content, not because the data I have stated is untrue, but because I was a patriot who reported facts that the Bulgarians were both valiant and cultural when, in the opinion of my opponents, it was obvious that the Bulgarians were created by nature as a fertilizer on foreign fields … My chauvinism, proving that Thrace and Macedonia were old Bulgarian lands, threatened on the one hand Russia, which aspired to South Thrace as a hinterland of the Dardanelles and on the other hand - Pannonian Slavs who aspired to Thessaloniki. The opinion of Paninese Slavs was also supported by Bulgarian scientists.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

Books, Law, Support, Nature

“The error in depicting critics of animal experiments as anti-science becomes clear when one begins to question the extent to which the purported scientific aims of these experiments are actually accomplished. For then it turns out that the experiments and not their critics are unscientific.”

Deborah Mayo American philosopher

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, p. 340

Error, Question, Science, Animals

“If you read some of the Parisian newspapers, among others the 'Figaro', so beloved of the right-thinking public, you must have learned that I am part of a group of artists who opened a private exhibition [in the art-gallery of Durand-Ruel in Paris, April 1876]. You must also have seen what favour this exhibition enjoys in the eyes of these gentlemen [Berthe refers to the critical articles in Paris with all their mockery about her works]. On the other hand, we have been praised in the radical newspaper, but you don't read those [her aunts]! Well, at least we are getting attention, and we have enough self-esteem not to care. My brother-in-law Edouard Manet is not with us [Manet didn't participate in this first Impressionist show, initiated by Degas ]. Speaking of success, he [Manet] has just been rejected by the Salon; he, too, is perfectly good-humored about his failure.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

In a letter to her aunts, 1876; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 155
Berthe wrote this letter after the second Impressionist exhibition of April 1876 where she was participating with 19 pictures (Monet with 18!)
1871 - 1880

Law, Art, Failure, Thinking

“Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Responding to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, which Mr. Blair urged Venezuela to abide by the rules of the international community. (February 2006) 1 http://world.time.com/2013/03/05/remembering-hugo-chavez-a-demagogues-career-in-quotes/ 2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20712033 2006

Communication, Hell

“The study of race differences in intelligence is an acid test case for psychology. Can behavioral scientists research this subject with the same freedom, objectivity, thoroughness, and scientific integrity with which they go about investigating other psychological phenomena? In short, can psychology be scientific when it confronts an issue that is steeped in social ideologies? In my attempts at self- analysis this question seems to me to be one of the most basic motivating elements in my involvement with research on the nature of the observed psychological differences among racial groups. In a recent article (Jensen, 1985b) I stated:I make no apology for my choice of research topics. I think that my own nominal fields of expertise (educational and differential psychology) would be remiss if they shunned efforts to describe and understand more accurately one of the most perplexing and critical of current problems. Of all the myriad subjects being investigated in the behavioral and social sciences, it seems to me that one of the most easily justified is the black- white statistical disparity in cognitive abilities, with its far reaching educational, economic, and social consequences. Should we not apply the tools of our science to such socially important issues as best we can? The success of such efforts will demonstrate that psychology can actually behave as a science in dealing with socially sensitive issues, rather than merely rationalize popular prejudice and social ideology.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 258
Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), pp. 438-9

Education, Behavior, Intelligence, Motivation

“Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director, and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur
Books

Star

“Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 73

“The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics — mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Criticism" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

“When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation…. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

Thinking

“Science focuses on the study of the natural world. It seeks to describe what exists. Focusing on problem finding, it studies and describes problems in its various domains. The humanities focus on understanding and discussing the human experience. In design, we focus on finding solutions and creating things and systems of value that do not yet exist.
The methods of science include controlled experiments, classification, pattern recognition, analysis, and deduction. In the humanities we apply analogy, metaphor, criticism, and (e)valuation. In design we devise alternatives, form patterns, synthesize, use conjecture, and model solutions. \
Science values objectivity, rationality, and neutrality. It has concern for the truth. The humanities value subjectivity, imagination, and commitment. They have a concern for justice. Design values practicality, ingenuity, creativity, and empathy. It has concerns for goodness of fit and for the impact of design on future generations.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Designing Social Systems in a Changing World (1996), p. 34-35, as cited in Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Truth, World, Justice, Imagination

“Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Democracy, Understanding, Country

“Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

night of 18-19 July 1941.
Disputed, (1941-1944) (published 1953)

World, History, Failure, Problem

“The commonplace needs no defence,
Dullness is in the critic’s eyes,
Without a licence life evolves
From some dim phase its own surprise;

Under these yellow-twinkling elms,
Behind these hedges trimly shorn,
As in a stable once, so here
It may be born, it may be born.”

William Plomer (1903–1973) South African-British writer

"The Bungalows", line 45, from A Shot in the Park (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955).

Life

“I watch news programs and I love Comedy Central. I love The Daily Show-it's smarter than anything else. I also like The Critic and Celebrity Death Match and South Park. I love all of that.”

Bea Arthur (1922–2009) actress, singer, comedian

Interview, TV Legends, August 6, 2005

Love, Death

“Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?… So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves.”

Peter Jennings (1938–2005) News anchor

Criticism "goes with the territory"

“There are no more geniuses, only critics.”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Austrian-American composer

"Those Who Complain about the Decline" (1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 203
1920s

“This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zV3vIXZ-1Y&t=6s 2000s

Death, God, Hate, War

“Let me tell you about what we call our field trips. It may surprise you to know, that I have personally visited, with many of my associates, practically every city in the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. If any of you has done this, you realize what big a country it is. It has taken me weeks and weeks of the hardest kind of work and continual travel to accomplish this. I which that my duties were such that I could do more of it; and I am trying to arrange my affairs so that I can. On these trips I visit from five to ten dealers a day. I meet them in their own places of business, talk with them across their own desks and solicit from them suggestions and criticisms as to their relations with the Corporation; the character of the product; the Corporation's policies; the trend of consumer demand; their viewpoint as to the future, and many other things that such contact makes possible. I solicit criticism of anything and everything.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 343

Travel, Business, Future, Personality

“What the BJP government claims to offer, what all scholarly historians want, and what is loathed by the Marxists who have dominated the cultural and educational establishment since decades, is glasnost: openness, an end to the dead hand of Marxist dogma in Indian history-writing. However, it is quite wrong to say that the Sangh Parivar takes this job “very seriously”. It took three years before relieving leading Marxists of their influential positions (Prasar Bharati, NCERT, IHC). Most of its new nominees were not up to the job, some because of ill-health (e. g. K. S. Lal and B. R. Grover, both now deceased), some because they had never functioned in an academic setting. It should not be forgotten that for decades, at least since ca. 1970 when the Marxists led by P. N. Haksar and Nurul Hasan were given a lot of effective power in this sector in return for their support to Indira Gandhi, distinctly non-Marxist young historians found their access to an academic career blocked by the Marxist hegemons. Of the new textbooks, some are impeccable and are welcomed as undeniable improvements, e. g. Meenakshi Jain’s presentation of the Muslim period, arguably the most sensitive and controversial part of the series. Some of the others, by contrast, have been criticized or ridiculed even by fair-minded observers.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Health, Education, History, Support

“The modern academics find it politically incorrect to criticize the devastation under Islamic rule, even though post-colonial scholars have amply exposed the ruin created by the British.”

Rajiv Malhotra book Indra's Net

Indra's Net (2014)

“I say I can't thank you too much for the name 'Nocturne' as a title for my moonlights! You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me — besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Anderson and Koval, p. 186; as quoted on the English Wikipedia
posthumous published

Pleasure, Idea

“Sir — In finding so much to praise in 'Entertaining Mr. Sloane,' which seems to be nothing more than a highly sensationalized, lurid, crude and over-dramatised picture of life at its lowest, surely your dramatic critic has taken leave of his senses.The effect this nauseating work had on me was to make we want to fill my lungs with some fresh, wholesome Leicester Square air. A distinguished critic, if I quote him correctly, felt the sensation of snakes crawling around his ankles while watching it.Yours truly,Peter Pinnell”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

This letter was written by Orton under a pseudonym and was published by the Daily Telegraph (p.283 of the Orton Diaries)
The Orton Diaries (1986), The Edna Welthorpe letters

Life, Quotes

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way, Feeling, Time, Country

“When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

L'Envoi, Stanza 1 (1896).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Lie, Faith, Painting

“Forbidden to write anything critical of the Fascist regime, they could only report what the hierarchy wanted them to report. The clever and honest American and British journalists, however, did insinuate startling facts in their stories; these insinuations, unfortunately, were between the lines and not for those who read as they run, and the American public is mostly a running reading public.”

George Seldes (1890–1995) American journalist

Can These Things Be! (1931)

Reading

“But if our democracy is to flourish it must have criticism, if our government is to function it must have dissent. Only totalitarian governments insist upon conformity and they—as we know—do so at their peril.”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 153

Democracy

“Technology policy - whether we should have one and what form such a policy should take - was a core issue of the 1992 presidential campaign, and in February 1993 the Clinton administration confirmed that fostering new technologies will be a critical part of its agenda for redirecting the American economy.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

L.M. Branscomb (1993) Empowering technology: Implementing a US policy

Parting

“Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 11, “The power of heat is unlimited” (p. 105)

People, Support, Thinking, Dependency

“The critical element in this equation is developing inclusiveness that envelopes all these competing priorities (of the different ethnic groups) in a manner that is fair to all. Without it we risk remaining a divided society all the more tragic for having unfulfilled our potential.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in Nadi, 6 September 2005.

“By the path into which Lange has led us we therefore ascend from the agnostic-critical standpoint to the higher and invigorating one of a thorough, all-sided, and affirmative idealism.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Later German Philosophy, p.171

“But, the people who criticized these people were … what? I am so disgusted with people who think free speech is defined as being able to say what you think without being criticized.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

In reference to Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks comment at the 49th Grammy Awards that "People are using their freedom of speech tonight [by giving us] all these awards. I'm very humbled."
2000s, 2007, Dissident Chicks (2007)

People, Thinking

“The FBI may decide to leave a suspected mole undisturbed for years in order to feed him false critical information at an opportune moment or to use him to catch a bigger fish.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Fish, Falseness

“I think stem cell research is crucial. I think medically it has a great future. I think that the answers aren't in yet. Some people say it's absolutely the answer, and others say it's no good and don't do it. It's not known yet, and I'll tell you what: politicians and bureaucrats and the FDA don't know either, and I don't think that's where it should be determined. It should be determined in the marketplace. In Washington so far we only had two choices, either prohibit it or subsidize it. My position is that we shouldn't do either. It should be in the states to devise the rules and laws on what you can do and can't do. Though I'm very strong pro-life and the worst thing I can conceive of is manufacturing babies to be used for research, but as an obstetrician I've had on quite a few occasions to do a surgery on a woman with a pregnancy in the Fallopian tube. And, the fetus is small, and alive, and the heart is beating, but if you don't operate on him, the fetus dies and the patient dies, because a hemorrhage is a very very critical time for ectopic pregnancy. I don't see any reason why you can't use that fetal tissue for research.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Politico TV, May 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dojI3UYIcGg 2000s, 2006-2009

Life, People, Law, Thinking

“Here as elsewhere human reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Die menschliche Vernunft hat hier, wie allerwärts in ihrem reinen Gebrauche, so lange es ihr an Kritik fehlt, vorher alle mögliche unrechte Wege versucht, ehe es ihr gelingt, den einzigen wahren zu treffen.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Way

“We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, whither soever it leads.”

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851–1921) American theologian

Selected Shorter Writings (Phillipsburg: PRR Publishing, 1970), p. 463

Children, Truth, History, Courage

“The Justice Department's conclusion that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 does not prohibit discrimination based on actual or perceived capacity to transmit AIDS to others has been assailed as legally or medically flawed, mean-spirited, and antagonistic toward the gay community. The criticisms are misplaced. The Department's sober examination of the Rehabilitation Act reveals a commendable dedication to the rule of law and the belief that Congress, not bureaucrats, should be the foremost architect of national public policy. … The gay community and other political minorities, as the foremost beneficiaries of the rule of law, should applaud, not condemn, the Department's opinion. By refusing to usurp policy making power from Congress, the Justice Department acted in the highest tradition of executive restraint.”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

AIDS in the workplace; the administration's impeccable logic http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/13/business/aids-in-the-workplace-the-administration-s-impeccable-logic.html, The New York Times (July 13, 1986)

Justice, Law, Communication

“We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that.”

Peter Jennings (1938–2005) News anchor

Criticism "goes with the territory"

War, People, Way, Behavior

“We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

“[Black Jade] had her lamp relit and began to compose a series of quatrains, writing them directly on the handkerchiefs that Pao-yu had sent. After writing three stanzas, she began to feel exhausted and feverish. Going to her mirror, she found her cheeks flushed as if they were afire. She thought nothing of it, but from that moment on, her illness entered a more critical stage.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 178

Feeling

“We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Who is Loyal to America? (1947)

People, Education, Training

“I don't take criticisms personally, which must be very annoying for people who mean them personally.”

Nigella Lawson (1960) British food writer, journalist and broadcaster

A woman of extremes (2001)

People, Personality

“I first read the poems in my early youth, with an ardent credulity that remained unshaken for many years of my life; and with a pleasure to which even the triumphant satisfaction of detecting the imposture is comparatively nothing. The enthusiasm with which I read and studied the poems, enabled me afterwards, when my suspicions were once awakened, to trace and expose the deception with greater success. Yet, notwithstanding the severity of minute criticism, I can still peruse them as a wild and wonderful assemblage of imitations, with which the fancy is often pleased and gratified, even when the judgment condemns them most.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Malcolm Laing, The Poems of Ossian, Vol. I (1805), p. 441.
Criticism

Life, Pleasure, Youth, Study

“I thanked the President [George W. Bush] for the steadfastness and resolve with which he's tackling the very complicated problems in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as the Israel-Palestinian issue…. It's critical for us in Southeast Asia that America does that…. because it affects America's standing in Asia and the world, and also the security environment in Asia because extremists, the jihadists, watch carefully what's happening in the Middle East and take heart, or lose heart, depending on what's happening.”

Lee Hsien Loong (1952) Prime Minister of Singapore

President Bush Welcomes Prime Minister Lee of Singapore to the White House http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070504-3.html# May 4, 2007

World, Problem, Heart, Dependency

“No critic as yet comprehends entirely why our houses are so poorly constructed, why they look so abominable, why they cost so much for construction and for maintenance, and why they are so uncomfortable.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Housing

“The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_405. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Law, Housing

“The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Truth, Soul, Spring, Sense

“The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Criticism (1893).

Art

“He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

When Pausch spoke of "when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gaveup." he was quoting an assistant coach of football coach James Graham
The Last Lecture (2007)

Love, Life

“I know very well how limited and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is race-bound and it's class-bound. It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire. If you invite the average Englishman to share his liberties with the inhabitants of India or Kenya, he will reply, "Never," if he is a Tory, and "Not until I consider them worthy" if he is a Liberal.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

"Liberty In England", Speech (June 21, 1935), reprinted in Abinger Harvest (1936).

Freedom

“The situation also gave U. N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali a chance to start the U. N.'s disegagement from Bosnia, something he had long wanted to do. After a few meetings with him, I concluded that this elegant and subtle Egyptian, whose Coptic family could trace its origins back over centuries, had disdain for the fractious and firty peoples of the Balkans. Put bluntly, he never liked the place. In 1992, during his only visit to Sarajevo, he made the comment that shocked the journalists on the day I arrived in the beleaguered capital: "Bosnia is a rich man's war. I understand your frustration, but you have a situation here that is better than ten other places in the world. … I can give you a list." He complained many times that Bosnia was eating up his budget, diverting him from other priorities, and threatening the whole U. N. system. "Bosnia has created a distortion in the work of the U. N.", he said just before Srebrenica. Sensing that our diplomatic efforts offered an opportunity to disengage, he informed the Security Council on September 18 that he would be ready to end the U. N. role in the forme Yugoslavia, and allow all key aspects of implementation to be placed with others. Two days later, he told Madeleine Albright that the Contact Group should create its own mechanism for implementation - thus volunteering to reduce the U. N.'s role at a critical moment. Ironically, his weakness simplified our task considerably.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), pp. 174-175

War, People, World, Family

“In 1963, when I completed my PhD, it was mostly on the steady-state theory using mathematical formulations to describe creation of matter. People always argued that you cannot have matter coming out of nothing, what would happen to the law of conservation of matter. It is a normal criticism of the steady-state theory. One could answer it either in one sentence by saying what is the big-bang theory where the entire universe came out of nothing, so you are violating the law of conservation of matter and energy in a big way. But that would be to point out the weakness of the other theories and not answering your own theory.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

An Exclusive Interview with Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

People, Law, Way, Mathematics

“Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290. ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 184): Mathematics as a fine art.

Men, Art, Imagination, Study

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

T.S. Eliot book Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Art, Dead

“Though many will criticize the president for mis-steps in Iraq and at home, it is with the complicity of Congress that we have become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrolled spying on the American people. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely the opposite is true.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Getting Iraq War Funding Wrong Again, April 30, 2007 http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst043007.htm 2000s, 2006-2009

War, People, Secret, Home

“As is often the case with major disputes in economics, the argument over fiscal policy went on for years, with some critics of fiscal policy still defending their position when this book went to press. It seems fair, however, to say that among economists a more or less Keynesian view of the effects of fiscal policy came to prevail. Careful statistical studies at the International Monetary Fund and else where showed that austerity policies have historically been followed by contraction, not expansion. Recent experience, in which countries like Spain and Greece that were forced into severe austerity also experienced severe slumps, seemed to confirm that observation. Furthermore, it was clear that those who had predicted a sharp rise in U. S. interest rates due to budget deficits, leading to conventional crowding out, had been wrong: U. S. long-term interest rates remained near record lows even during the years from 2009 to 2012, when the government ran very large deficits.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Source: Economics (4th ed., 2015), Chapter 33. Macroeconomics: Events and Ideas

Books, Study, Country

“Hans Haacke's "Visitor's Profile" encouraged visitors to interact with a computer by inputting personal information, which was then tabulated to output statistical data on the exhibition's audience. Such demographic research - as art - opened up a critical discourse, following Foucault and others, on the exclusivity of cultural institutions and their patrons, revealing the myth of public service as a thin veneer justifying the hierarchical values that reify extant social relations. Similarly, "Interactive Paper Systems" by Sonia Sheridan, engaged museum-goers in a creative exchange with the artist and 3M's first commercially available color photocopying machine, dissolving conventional artist-viewer-object relations. In "The Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea)" Joseph Kosuth utilized multiple forms of mass media and distribution (a billboard, an newspaper advertisement, a banner, and a museum installation) to question the conceptual and contextual boundaries between art, philosophy, commerce, pictures, and texts.”

Edward A. Shanken (1964) American art historian

Edward A. Shanken. " The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art http://www.artexetra.com/House.html" in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November, 1998)

Art, Color, Idea, Question

“Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

Thinking, Sense

“Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Nancy A. Moran, Election Year: 2004, Member Directory, National Academy of Sciences, http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/2538196.html]

Communication, Time, Animals

“From experience it has been observed that a newly converted Communist frequently acquires a feeling of omniscient superiority over his unconverted fellow men. He feels that at last the universe is laid out before him in a simple, comprehensible manner. If he has never wrestled with philosophical problems before he is likely to be overwhelmed by the infatuating possibility that through Dialectical Materialism man has finally solved all of the basic problems necessary to understand the universe. In this state of mind the student will often drop his attitude of critical inquiry. He will invite indoctrination in heavy doses because of his complete assurance that he has at last discovered Truth in its ultimate form.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, Truth, Feeling, Understanding

“Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is.”

Matthew Arnold On Translating Homer

On Translating Homer (1861)

Art, History, Literature, Knowledge

“No one can deny the suffering, fear, or panic, the terror or fright that can seize certain animals and that we humans can witness. … No doubt either, then, of there being within us the possibility of giving vent to a surge of compassion, even if it is then misunderstood, repressed, or denied, held at bay. … The two centuries I have been referring to somewhat casually in order to situate the present in terms of this tradition have been those of an unequal struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity. War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably ageless but, and here is my hypothesis, it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. Henceforth more than ever. And I say “to think” this war, because I believe it concerns what we call “thinking.””

Jacques Derrida book The Animal That Therefore I Am

The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.
Specters of Marx (1993), The Animal That Therefore I Am, 1997

Life, War, Fear, Thinking

“"It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard's stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them, whether they were ostensibly commercial or not. He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt — for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote." ~ H. P. Lovecraft, "Robert Ervin Howard: A Memorium", Fantasy Magazine, 1936 (Reprinted in The Last Celt, Glenn Lord ed., p. 69, 1976,”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

About

Secret, Personality, Sincerity

“… For ancient heroes the exhaustive method is possible: all that can be known of them is contained in a few short passages of Greek and Latin, and it is quite possible to say whatever can be said about every one of these; the result would not be unreasonably bulky, though it might be dull. But in the case of men who have lived in the thick of the crowded modern world, no such course is admissible; overmuch may be said, and we must choose what we will say. Biographers, however, are rarely bold enough to adopt the selective method consistently. They have, we suspect, the fear of the critics before their eyes.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[ART. VII—John Milton, National Review, July 1859, 9, 150–186, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027193559;view=1up;seq=161] (quote from p. 151)
John Milton (1859)

Men, World, Fear

“""You'll always be powerless to this girl. You'll never be in charge. There's something there," George told me, "that makes you crazy and always will. If you don't cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You're no longer merely answering natural need with her. This is the pathology in its purest form. Look," he told me, "see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl - you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? … I'm not against it because it's digusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

Love, People, Law, Soul

“Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Songbook (2003)

Feeling

“It is not necessary to believe that a political consensus to focus on the lives of the most disadvantaged will happen tomorrow in order to recenter discrimination discourse at the intersection. It is enough, for now, that such an effort would encourage us to look beneath the prevailing conceptions of discrimination and to challenge the complacency that accompanies belief in the effectiveness of this framework. By so doing, we may develop language which is critical of the dominant view and which provides some basis for unifying activity. The goal of this activity should be to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for whom it can be said: “When they enter, we all enter.””

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Effort

“It is remarkable that this generalization of plane geometry to surface geometry is identical with that generalization of geometry which originated from the analysis of the axiom of parallels. …the construction of non-Euclidean geometries could have been equally well based upon the elimination of other axioms. It was perhaps due to an intuitive feeling for theoretical fruitfulness that the criticism always centered around the axiom of parallels. For in this way the axiomatic basis was created for that extension of geometry in which the metric appears as an independent variable. Once the significance of the metric as the characteristic feature of the plane has been recognized from the viewpoint of Gauss' plane theory, it is easy to point out, conversely, its connection with the axiom of parallels. The property of the straight line as being the shortest connection between two points can be transferred to curved surfaces, and leads to the concept of straightest line; on the surface of the sphere the great circles play the role of the shortest line of connection… analogous to that of the straight line on the plane. Yet while the great circles as "straight lines" share the most important property with those of the plane, they are distinct from the latter with respect to the axiom of the parallels: all great circles of the sphere intersect and therefore there are no parallels among these "straight lines". …If this idea is carried through, and all axioms are formulated on the understanding that by "straight lines" are meant the great circles of the sphere and by "plane" is meant the surface of the sphere, it turns out that this system of elements satisfies the system of axioms within two dimensions which is nearly identical in all of it statements with the axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry; the only exception is the formulation of the axiom of the parallels.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The geometry of the spherical surface can be viewed as the realization of a two-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry: the denial of the axiom of the parallels singles out that generalization of geometry which occurs in the transition from the plane to the curve surface.
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Way, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things. He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God's involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re-interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination. Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph. D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate

Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D. http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm

Life, God, World, Imagination

“Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity… President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, April, Foreign Policy Speech (27 April 2016)

Love, Democracy

“To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (2003)

Housing

“Criticism, like so many other things, keeps to what has been said before and does not get out of the rut. This business of the 'Beautiful' some see it in curved lines, some in straight lines, but all persist in seeing it as a matter of line. I am now looking out of my window and I can see the most lovely countryside; lines just do not come into my head: the lark is singing, the river sparkles with a thousand diamonds, the leaves are whispering; where, I should like to know, are the lines that produce delicious impressions like these? They refuse to see proportion or harmony except between two lines: all else they regard as chaos, and the dividers alone are judge.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote from a letter to Léon Peisse, 15 July 1949; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
this quote refers to Delacroix's refusal to use the line as boundary of the form in his painting art, as a too sharp dividing force in the picture - in contrast to the famous classical painter in Paris then, Ingres
1831 - 1863

Love, Beauty, Business, Singing

“The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the National Prayer Breakfast, it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

Money, Truth, Stupidity, School

“I was tired of painting. So many collectors bought paintings and locked them in bank vaults. The stained-glass windows allowed me to make public art…. One day a woman stopped me in the street to talk to me about Champ-de-Mars metro station. "Whether it's sunny, rainy, or snowing, I love your stained-glass windows at Champ-de-Mars. Those big dancing shapes always warm my heart." That woman was neither a collector nor an art critic, but she understood the meaning I meant to give that work.”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

Original in French: J'étais dégoûtée de la peinture. Bon nombre de collectionneurs achetaient des tableaux pour les enfermer dans des voûtes de banques. Les verrières m'ont permis de faire de l'art public.... Un jour, une femme m'a abordée dans la rue pour me parler de la station de métro Champ-de-Mars. « Qu'il fasse beau, qu'il pleuve ou qu'il neige, j'adore vos verrières du Champ-de-Mars. Ces grandes formes qui dansent me font chaud au coeur. » Cette femme n'étaient ni une collectionneuse ni une critique d'art, mais elle avait compris le sens que j'avais voulu donner à cette oeuvre.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

Love, Art, Heart, Dance

“Although I realize that Austrian-school economists have themselves been highly critical of monetarism, many of its most fundamental claims are in fact fully consistent with their own understanding of monetary theory. Indeed, back in the 1970s the difference between Austrian and monetarists writings about money seemed trivial compared to the difference between them and the writings of other (broadly "Keynesian") economists. I recall very well how I myself got "deprogrammed" from mainstream thinking about money and inflation by reading Henry Hazlitt's wonderful book, The Inflation Problem, and How to Resolve It. Hazlitt was, of course, a thoroughgoing Misesian. Yet no one who reads his book can fail to note the many crucial similarities between his arguments and those of Milton Friedman concerning the same subject.”

George Selgin (1957) economist

In Defense of Monetarism (2008)

Money, Books, School, Understanding

“The function of logic in mathematics is critical rather than constructive.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Mathematics

“This is what has Gropius the director made the Bauhaus famous. Not its lamps or its furniture. They are all out of fashion already. But the way of approaching formal problems or material as such, that has made it famous. And the emphasis on material, especially its capacity is my contribution. That was never cleared between us teachers. Kandinsky did what he thought should be done. Klee developed an absolutely different method. Schlemmer developed absolutely something else. Klee was my so-called form master. In the workshops there they had a crafts master and a form master. The crafts master had to direct the practical work, the mechanics of the workshop. And the form master had to develop the, formal qualities. Klee was my form master in the glass workshop. He came to me and never criticized anything. He talked about something else. Never asked about any form problem with the windows I was working on. Never a word. He was too respectful. He was the nicest master I could ask for. He talked about exhibitions. He thought I should exhibit. That's another story. We had a good relationship because we never dealt with the same problems. He didn’t attack our problems. He never brought up a problem.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Way, Fashion, Problem, Teachers

“The work of art… in seemingly by-passing all difficulties, attains full freedom, thus in fact nourishing the prevailing ideology. It functions as a security valve for the system, an image of freedom in the midst of general alienation and finally as a bourgeois concept supposedly beyond all criticism, natural, above and beyond all ideology.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Daniel Buren, "Critical Limits," (1970), in: Buren, Five Texts, trans. Laurent Sauerwein (New York: John Weber Gallery, 1973), p. 45
1970s

Art, Nature, Freedom

“They have vilified me, they have crucified me; yes, they have even criticized me.”

Richard J. Daley (1902–1976) American politician

[William, Schmidt, Willaim E. Schmidt, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE3DD1038F932A15751C0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all#, Chicago Journal; Syntax Is a Loser in Mayoral Race, The New York Times, February 2, 1989, 2008-10-12]
A statement he once made in response to criticisms, alluding that he treated criticism on par with vilification and crucifixion.