#criticism

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president... is morally treasonable to the American public. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#american public #announce #criticism #morally #must

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. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#character #criticism #experts #favorite #german

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#get #ignore #making #most #poetry

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead! ↗

— James Howard Kunstler

#clown #clowns #community #social-criticism #the-united-states

Self criticism must be my guide to action, and the first rule for its employment is that in itself it is not a virtue, only a procedure. ↗

— Kingsley Amis

#criticism #employment #first #guide #itself

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not. ↗

— Alfred Whitney Griswold

#criticism #kind #tells #thing #which

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism. ↗

— Wole Soyinka

#criticism #freedom #greatest #greatest threat #threat

The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you. ↗

— Criss Jami

#biggest #confidence #conscience #control #critic

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend! ↗

— Edith Wharton

#hypocrisy #new-york #pulitzer-prize #social-criticism #age

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#age