Critique Quotes

“Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“One who enjoys finding errors will then start creating errors to find.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Don't be fool enough to think you can know a person's character after a few moments of observation. You can't. You have no idea where his life began or how his saga has unfolded thus far. Only his present state can you witness. To judge him at a glance is like reading one page in an open book, believing it's enough to confidently recite the story from beginning to end. True, one page may tell you much, but not nearly enough to accurately critique a book or evaluate a life. So, either become his friend and learn his entire story, or refrain from commenting on a tale you know nothing about.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Well, I'm not defining good and bad art, except, that art that appeals to me or repels me is good. Art that bores me is bad.”
― Lucien Carr

“Metaphysics... is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically. Nothing here can escape us, because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden, but is brought to light by reason itself as soon as reason's common principle has been discovered. The perfect unity of this kind of cognition, and the fact that it arises solely out of pure concepts without any influence that would extend or increase it from experience or even particular intuition, which would lead to a determinate experience, make this unconditioned completeness not only feasible but also necessary. Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex. Dwell in your own house, and you will know how simple your possessions are. - Persius”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.”
― Henry A. Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism

“I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Le grand monde a son argot. Mais cet argot s'appelle le style.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes. Ou menent les mauvais chemins

“Those who find it hypocritical of others to use, say, a smartphone, to speak ill of capitalism, needs to be reminded that capitalism is an ideology, not a technology.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“...Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“I surround myself with books when I write, thus surrounding myself with writers... only they don't critique me and then get up for coffee.”
― Ryan Lilly, Write like no one is reading

“In the land of poetry commentary, you will encounter those who take poetry too lightly, and those who take poetry too seriously. The former will give you no real indication of their true opinion of the merits of the poem, while the latter shall reject it out of hand, or be entirely unsatisfied until you write it to their liking. Neither are worth paying attention to.”
― Jasper Sole

“Noticing the disturbing similarity between the rhetoric surrounding "open government" and new public management, government expert Just Longo speculates that the former might be just a Trojan horse for the latter; in our excitement about the immense potential of new technologies to promote openness and transparency, we may have lost sight of the deeply political nature of the uses to which these technologies are put...

In India, recent digitization of land records and their subsequent publication online, while nominally an effort to empower the weak, may have actually empowered the rich and powerful. Once the digitized records were available for the whole world to see, some enterprising businessmen discovered that many poor families had no documents to prove ownership of land. In most cases, this was not the result of some nefarious land grab; local culture, with its predominantly oral ways of doing business, pervasive corruption, and poor literacy, partly explains why no such records exist...

The point here, as with most open-government schemes, is not that information shouldn't be collected or distributed; rather, it needs to be collected and distributed in full awareness of the social and cultural complexity of the institutional environment in which it is gathered.”
― Evgeny Morozov

“At first, one only recognizes particular instances to be worth of critique; critique appears synonymous with rejection, implying deficiency in the object. Over time, one discovers that everything warrants critique. This can produce cynicism: nothing is above reproach, nothing is pure, therefore nothing has value. But followed through to its logical conclusion, this insight inspires a profound optimism: if everything can be critiqued, then no matter how bleak things are, there is always a way to improve them. Those who comprehend this can pass beyond the binary of approval and disapproval to identify the conflicting currents within any subject of inquiry. There are sides to take inside every position, as well as between them.”
― CrimethInc., Contradictionary

“Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.”
― Margaret Atwood

“When I took over as chair of the fashion program, I was horrified that only the faculty member was allowed to speak in a critique. I'm talking about perfectly nurturing teachers. But the rule was there would be no call of hands for students to contribute their feedback. It was embedded in the department's culture. That was alarming to me. When I was teaching, I was the least important person in the room as far as I was concerned--my students' points of view mattered most. I wanted to learn who they were and teach them to respect one another's perspectives.

I would start off by saying something like, "I am having trouble understanding how this work solves the problem at hand. Here are some things about the work that I appreciate: X, Y, Z. But I see these virtues independent of the problem we're solving.”
― Tim Gunn

“Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.”
― The New York Times

“With the growth of market individualism comes a corollary desire to look for collective, democratic responses when major dislocations of financial collapse, unemployment, heightened inequality, runaway inflation, and the like occur. The more such dislocations occur, the more powerful and internalized, Hayek insists, neoliberal ideology must become; it must become embedded in the media, in economic talking heads, in law and the jurisprudence of the courts, in government policy, and in the souls of participants. Neoliberal ideology must become a machine or engine that infuses economic life as well as a camera that provides a snapshot of it. That means, in turn, that the impersonal processes of regulation work best if courts, churches, schools, the media, music, localities, electoral politics, legislatures, monetary authorities, and corporate organizations internalize and publicize these norms.”
― William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism

“I welcome reviews from all readers. I take criticism well; but please . . . no comments on my author face!”
― C.C. Alma

“A social critic is someone whose work revolves around where and how our successes are failing us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“230Our Internet debates...tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite...is always bad.”
― Evgeny Morozov

“On n'est vraiment indulgent que quand on est amoureux fou; dès qu'on aime un rien moins, la vacherie naturelle reprend le dessus.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Le Voyage d'hiver

“I’ve often been criticised, but never critically wounded”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour.”
― Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

“Critique don’t criticize.”
― A.D. Posey

“Ingen kand dømme om et Skuespill, uden den der haver udstuderet et Theatrum, og af Erfarenhed mærket, hvad Virkning en Comoedie giør paa Skue-Pladsen: Og, naar saa er, kand man ikke meget reflectere paa deres Domme, der sidde hiemme og criticere udi deres Skriver-Stuer, uden at have seet et Skuespills Forestilning; thi de samme kand ikke dømme uden om Stilen, om Moralske Sententzer, og et Stykkes Regularitet, da Erfarenhed lærer, at en Comoedie, som efter alle Academiske Regler er indretted, dog ingen Comoedie er. Thi mangt et Skuespill, som ved Læsning synes at være af ingen Betydelse, haver den fortreffeligste Virkning paa Skue-Pladsen. Et Skuespils Vægt og Gyldighed grunder sig derfor ikke paa lærde Journalisters Critiqver, men paa Tilskuernes Applausu: naar jeg siger Tilskuerne, meener jeg alleene saadanne, som have en naturlig og ufordærved Smag.”
― Ludvig Holberg

“Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A “critique,” a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing to please all readers is like cooking without seasoning …”
― Nanette L. Avery