#critique

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#ethics #humanist-psychology #mental-health #socio-analysis #culture

If you look at our world, it's a world of critique. ↗

— Jose Canseco

#look #our #our world #world #you

The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view. ↗

— Ang Lee

#call #common #common man #critics #critique

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding. ↗

— Paul Ricoeur

#abstract #abstract thought #appear #been #characterized

My relationship with the journalists who covered the campaign was complicated. I often hid from the critical eye of their cameras and their omnipresent digital recorders, wary of the critique implicit in every captured moment. But I also grew to respect and understand their passion for their work, their love for the journey we were sharing. ↗

— Alexandra Kerry

#cameras #campaign #captured #complicated #covered

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#culture-indentity #philosophy #religion #imagination

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#enlightenment

[Capitalism assumed] that from the beginning all men are equal. If that were so everyone would be equipped with the same working power, the same education and, above all, the same economic assets … each person would [then] have only himself to blame if he did not succeed. ↗

— Knut Wicksell

#critique #education

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork. ↗

— Irène Némirovsky

#human-nature #society #nature