Criticism Quotes

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.

Charles Buxton

Let's define the word, what racist is - "A person who believes that their race to be superior to another's." I've never advocated that. And I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that I've said that is racist. Criticism is not racism. Accountability is not racism. And that's what I've tried to say over the years.

Pauline Lee Hanson

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the authors own conscience.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The preceding criticism ... justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of unmotivated celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.

Georges Bataille

Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.

Donald Barthelme

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

Djuna Barnes

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Kurt Huber

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.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Octavio Paz

In the face of unjust criticism we can become bitter or better; upset or understanding; hostile or humble; furious or forgiving.

William Arthur Ward

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

Josef Skvorecky

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.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Criticism, whatever may be its pretensions, never does more than to define the impression which is made upon it at a certain moment by a work wherein the writer himself noted the impression of the world which he received at a certain hour.

James Branch Cabell
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