Quotes About Criticism

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

In the spiritual domain, criticism is love turned sour. In a wholesome spiritual life there is no room for criticism. The critical faculty is an intellectual one, not a moral one. If criticism becomes a habit it will destroy the moral energy of the life and paralyse spiritual force. The only person who can criticise human beings is the Holy Spirit.

In the spiritual domain, criticism is love turned sour... If criticism becomes a habit, it will destroy the moral energy of the life and paralyze the spiritual force... Whenever you are in a critical temper, it is impossible to enter into communion with God. Criticism makes you hard and vindictive and cruel, and leaves you with the flattering unction that you are a superior person. It is impossible to develop the characteristics of a saint and maintain a critical attitude.

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

People who thought that she was busy going around trying to stir up difficulty where there was none or less than she imagined, were quite critical of her. She was, we must never forget, a public figure. And in democracies, public figures tend to attract criticism as well as praise. The most dangerous thing would be if anybody were regarded as above criticism. And Eleanor Roosevelt is, in recent years, getting there.

Criticism is hard for me but people find hard to believe because they think I'm very tough, very strident, that I tell everybody where to get off, and how. But I've actually got a really thin skin. I don't know. It's quite pathetic. So, yeah, it's hard for me to take criticism. But I also kind of have this sense of humor on overdrive, so I don't take any of it seriously. So that sort of saves me, the fact that I think it's just all kind of funny.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. . . . Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

You can't operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism. And the way to avoid criticism is to do nothing.

I don't think theory adds to criticism. (Methodology does, for better or worse.) Theory's function is to make criticism self-conscious, maybe even a little sheepish, about its ex cathedra pronouncements.

It may be relatively mild when expressed as criticism, anger, or feelings of severe frustration. Criticism has a negative influence on the feelings of love for and interest in one's spouse.

When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department.

Neither praise nor blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe and honestly to award - these are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Was any criticism of Obama permitted? It was not. We can't criticize the president of the United States. Why? Because he's African-American. And any criticism is said to be racist. And so we have more racists in America today than we've ever had by definition of criticizing the president.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

Take criticism, smash it into dust. Add color and use it to paint breathtaking images of unicorns frolicking through endless fields of greatness.

The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.

Without criticism of Islam, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.

I would just imagine there's a criticism for just about everything, if you want to take something down. No one's invincible. The Jicks are a work in progress and we don't think everything we do is the bee's knees or something, we're just trying our best to get turned on by what we're doing.

One bad review doesn't ruin my day because I realize what a badge of honor it is to get a bit of criticism at all.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.

Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

Criticism will plant FEAR in the human heart, or resentment, but it will not build love or affection.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

A devotee should be fixed in the conclusion that, the spiritual master cannot be subject to criticism and should never be considered equal to a common man.

I can take any amount of criticism, as long as it is unqualified praise.

I'll always miss Mad Men, of course, but it is interesting to finally answer different questions after nine years. Not that that's a criticism to anyone, but just simply as a character for nine years, you're going to get a lot of the same questions for many, many, many years. This is sort of refreshing.

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

I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf--at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel--you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

I've learned to be careful of becoming a critic. Criticism really sours your heart.

If we could only make our hands move as actively as our tongues, what wonders we could accomplish! Almost everyone loves to hear his own voice. It is so easy, too! Yet if we could say less and do more for each other's good, not alone would every home be happier, but communities would be enriched thereby. Instead of criticism by speech, to show someone a better way to do a thing would be of much greater value.

The way I feel about Crunk Feminists. Here you have a bunch of bloggers who are not even quoting any feminists' works who are telling me what I can do better when I've been doing this as my life's work while y'all still in college! What are you talking about? And their criticism was of the idea that we should approach people like Rick Ross and Lil' Wayne with love when they have lyrics that we don't like, as opposed to approaching them with hate. That's their issue: How dare I say I approach Rick Ross with love!

Comprehension, inventiveness, direction, and criticism: intelligence is contained in these four words.

The first rule of life is to reveal nothing, to be exceptionally cautious in what you say, in whatever company you may find yourself. If you have a secret, you have only to whisper it to your dearest friend with the strictest injunction that it will go no further, and within half a day the story is all over town, and when you do make what would seem to be a perfectly sensible remark, you will find it reported in the most grotesque form, thus incurring no end of criticism to rebound upon you.

One doesn't mind adverse criticism so long as it isn't stupid.

One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs.

The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

I'm afraid of being too sure, to just deliver. I think that's the biggest danger for actors - after a certain time, when you're known and recognised, people expect you to do what you're supposed to do, and there's almost no more criticism and that's very dangerous.

According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value.

Criticism is a surreal state, like a good drug gone bad. When it's bad you wish it would stop, and when it's good, you can't get enough.

I always heard criticism is the tax on fame. They were right. And then some.

A system such as classical mechanics may be 'scientific' to any degree you like; but those who uphold it dogmatically - believing, perhaps, that it is their business to defend such a successful system against criticism as long as it is not conclusively disproved - are adopting the very reverse of that critical attitude which in my view is the proper one for the scientist.

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.

I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

It feels like the more I'm out there in the public eye, the more criticism I get. You need to have confidence - that's what it takes to walk out there and sing a song in front of a huge group of people.