Critic Quotes: Insights and Wisdom from Renowned Critics (Page 2)

"Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality"

William Hazlitt, Critic

"The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings"

William Hazlitt, Critic

"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy"

William Hazlitt, Critic

"Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves"

William Hazlitt, Critic

"An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may"

William Hazlitt, Critic

"Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals"

Edmund Wilson, Critic

"His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship"

Edmund Wilson, Critic

"We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"I could never hate anyone I knew"

Charles Lamb, Critic

"Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical"

Margaret Fuller, Critic

"If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility"

Leonard Maltin, Critic

"What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth"

Roland Barthes, Critic

"Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive"

Roland Barthes, Critic

"America is a land where men govern, but women rule"

John Mason Brown, Critic

"He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace"

John Mason Brown, Critic

"It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"For the will and not the gift makes the giver"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books"

Bell Hooks, Critic

"It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief"

Lionel Trilling, Critic

"The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose"

John T. Flynn, Critic

"The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience"

Lester Bangs, Critic

"The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination"

Louis Kronenberger, Critic

"A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car"

Kenneth Tynan, Critic

"Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure"

Paul de Man, Critic

"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice"

Henry Louis Gates, Critic

"Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant"

John Simon, Critic

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