Best Criticism Quotes

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do. But it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism. Politicians challenge it at their peril because of the lobby’s ability to influence political contributions.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Doubt is an element of criticism, and the tendency of criticism is necessarily skeptical.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

At some point, the establishment narrative managers are going to realize that criticizing ‘Bernie bros’ for being angry isn’t an effective strategy, because the answer coming back is only ever going to be ‘Oh you have no fucking idea.’

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

‘American Sniper’ is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

Alas, criticism has always been what human beings, especially leaders, most hate to hear.

Encourage me, and I will not forget you.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, andhave an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.

One doesn’t mind adverse criticism so long as it isn’t stupid.

I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. … Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure contumely without resentment.

Anti-Semitism does not signify opposition to Semitism. There is no such thing. It is an expression we Jews use effectively as a smear word used to brand as a bigot, like you guys, anyone who brings criticism against Jews. We use it against hate-mongers.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

I love constructive criticism.

There is no such thing as constructive criticism.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can’t be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.

Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection.

The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.