Roger Ebert Quotes

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

There are few circumstances which so strongly distinguish the philosopher, as the calmness with which he can reply to criticisms he may think undeservedly severe.

Most hard-boiled people are half-baked.

Intellectuals are too sentimental for me.

I have to expose myself and then accept the judgment that audiences and critics will have. And that's okay. I appreciate the elliptical nature of it. Sometimes people are more in the mood to be nice to me than others, and that's great.

Irony is a great tool to deal with things. It's an intellectualization, a way to go above things, which can work.

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

I don't read the reviews because it somewhere affects my work. If some critic doesn't like a movie, I can't keep his criticisms in mind the next time I am making a film. Even if someone writes a great review about my film, I don't want to be affected by it.

I don't much believe in the hype of anything or anybody, not even myself.

A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

I wouldn't say that I dislike the young. I'm simply not a fan of naïveté.

Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.

We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.

Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

The concept of marriage must have been thought up by an unimaginative pig.

I've learned: When you get older, who cares? I don't mince words, I don't hold back. What are you gonna do to me? Fire me? It's been done. Threaten to commit suicide? Done. Take away my show? Done! Not invite to me to the Vanity Fair party? I've never been invited! If I ever saw the invitation, I'd use it as toilet paper.

He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part by which he means to be clever.

Cynicism is the humor of hatred.

Criticism discloses that which it would fain conceal, but conceals that which it professes to disclose; it is therefore, read by the discerning, not to discover the merits of an author, but the motives of his critic.