Criticism Quotes - Page 40

• Friendships are different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, friendship is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by law. But friendships are freely entered into, freely given, and freely exercised.

  Stephen Ambrose

  Friendship, Children, Couple

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• The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished.

  Richard Wagner

  Music, Immoral, Profession

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• Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.

  John Cage

  Music, Piano, Instruments

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• In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

  Trevor Nunn

  Views, Decision, Listening

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• Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Fashion, Stories

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• What do you think of the criticism that you're not very good?

  George Harrison

  Thinking, Very Good

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• Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.

  Charlie Brooker

  Children, School, Fairy Stories

  "When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells" by Charlie Brooker, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2006.

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• Hate is just a form of criticism. You can never truly grow as a person until you’ve taken everything the world can throw at you. Sometimes you just have to let it hit you and move on

  John O'Callaghan

  Hate, Moving, Taken

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• Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Soul, Atheism, Doe

  Miguel de Unamuno (1977). “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations”, p.90, Princeton University Press

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• Everything that happens to you is self-created. Whenever you're responding to any situation, whether it's a sip of coffee, or a traffic jam, or a love note, or criticism from a boss, or rainy weather, you're in fact responding to a signal that you generated within yourself.

  Deepak Chopra

  Coffee, Weather, Self

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• It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.

  Jan Struther

  War, Up Early, Civilization

  "Mrs. Miniver".

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• Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.

  Alan Barth

  Delusion, Indispensable, Dissent

  "The Loyalty of Free Men". Book by Alan Barth, 1951.

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• Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

  George Steiner

  Art, Reflection, Judgement

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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• A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity.

  Carolyn Wells

  Evil, Necessary Evil, Critics

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• Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.

  Ben Hecht

  Dubious, News, Benefits

  Ben Hecht (1954). “A child of the century”, Signet

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• Criticism is a great motivation. Failure is not an option to me.

  Wladimir Klitschko

  Motivation, Failure Is Not An Option

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• My criticism is too severe sometimes and that is not good. But why don't you start doing your work unless your leader flies into a rage? It is not that you cannot do it but that you don't want to do it

  Zhu Rongji

  Leader, Want, Fierce

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• You'll never do anything creative, innovative or world changing if you fear criticism. Pioneers are easy targets for arrows!

  Rick Warren

  Arrows, Creative, Pioneers

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• [He] seems to want it both ways: the freedom to hold and express beliefs, and immunity from criticism for those beliefs. This is the kind of attitude that leads inexorably to totalitarianism. It is to be decried, particularly in a university environment where the search for truth necessitates that no belief be treated as sacred or above scrutiny.

  Jeffrey Shallit

  Attitude, Want, Sacred

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• If we have any criticism of our leaders, we invite Satan into our lives and beliefs.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Life, Leader, Belief

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• There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

  Robert M. Hutchins

  School, Justification, Trade

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• When ideas are young and vulnerable, criticism can be lethal.

  Janet Echelman

  Ideas, Vulnerable, Young

  "Imagination Becomes Reality" by Janet Echelman, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 13, 2012.

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• Nine times out of 10, criticism is a defense mechanism. We criticize in others what we don't like in ourselves.

  Mark Batterson

  Defense, Nine, Criticize

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• However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Imagination, Tragedy

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• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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