Quotes by Critics - Page 58

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
George Orwell
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
George Orwell
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
George Orwell
If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)
Dorothy Parker
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Orson Scott Card
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
George Bernard Shaw
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas de Quincey
Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
Terry Eagleton
I bargained with Life for a penny,And Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;For Life is just an employer,He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have paid.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.
Joyce Carol Oates
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
Margaret Fuller
In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.
Orson Scott Card
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
George Orwell
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
George Orwell
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
Joyce Carol Oates
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Edith Sitwell
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
George Orwell
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies
And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.
Dorothy Parker
Why is it no one sent me yet one perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get one perfect rose.
Dorothy Parker
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
James D. Nicoll
Be you wise and never sad,You will get your lovely lad.Never serious be, nor true,And your wish will come to you--And if that makes you happy, kid,You'll be the first it ever did.
Dorothy Parker
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
H.L. Mencken
While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
H.L. Mencken
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
Dorothy Parker
Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....
George Bernard Shaw
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H.L. Mencken
If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Dorothy Parker
The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.
Dorothy Parker
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Dorothy Parker
Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Dorothy Parker
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
H.L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H.L. Mencken
This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?""I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?""Yes," she said."That's influenza," said Miro. "Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.
Orson Scott Card
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.
H.L. Mencken
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
Orson Scott Card
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
George Bernard Shaw
MenThey hail you as their morning starBecause you are the way you are.If you return the sentiment,They'll try to make you different;And once they have you, safe and sound,They want to change you all around.Your moods and ways they put a curse on;They'd make of you another person.They cannot let you go your gait;They influence and educate.They'd alter all that they admired.They make me sick, they make me tired.
Dorothy Parker
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
H.L. Mencken
You're a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable.
Orson Scott Card
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
Dorothy Parker
There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.", Summer 1956]
Dorothy Parker
I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
Dorothy Parker