Critical View Quotes

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

I’ve been listening to how the Roman Empire fell and all I can say is, it didn’t fall nearly fast enough!”-Iggy

I think one reason my books have found mainstream success is that they're written from a skeptical point of view.

My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I see it as a threat.

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

All through Latin America, there's sharp condemnation of the criminal atrocities of Sept. 11. But it's qualified by the observation that although these are horrible atrocities, they are not unfamiliar.

The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.

Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they become aliens to this Kingdom.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.

A wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.

Every past is worth condemning.

You are very harsh.' 'I have seen the world.

When I came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.

Who judges best of a Man, his Enemies or himself?

I'm not really a big Internet fan.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

Being away from home gave me a chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye

We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial and political interests of those who would mislead us into wrongdoing, and a sense of wonder.

Henry George espouses wild and illogical doctrines.

When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.

I think Common Core is a disaster. That doesn't mean there can't be a little tentacle left of the Department of Education, like 5 percent, just in terms of local coordination, perhaps.