Social Critic Quotes

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.

Rush Limbaugh is a principled conservative, master broadcaster and stinging social critic who has won his mammoth following through his own energy, individualism and wit. His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment. History will show that Limbaugh was a major force over the past decade in waking this country up from its p.c. coma.

James Baldwin is one of the greatest, North American writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and a brilliant social critic, he foreshadowed the destructive trends happening now in the whole Western world and beyond, while always maintaining a sense of humanistic hope and dignity. He explored palpable, yet unspoken, intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies and the inevitable, if unnameable, tensions with personal identity, assumptions, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

I know who Dick Gregory is; I knew what his accomplishments are. I certainly knew him as a comedian and an activist.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'

The Michelle Obama that her old friends remember, that people knew in Chicago, she was a really incisive social critic. She knew how to drive an argument home. People liked her both in the workplace and socially because she was so frank.

Bill Hicks - blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer, and brain specialist. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built.

I like Ben Stein. I think he's funny, creative, and an insightful commentator on a host of issues.

I love Caitlin Moran, because I feel like she's a friend, or a friend I want to have at least.

Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.

Today, I don't even think that people like [James Baldwin] are possible. He would not have that much room.

I don't consider myself a serious and social political critic.

Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne'er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties.

Bill Hicks wasn't just a comic, he was a crusader against humanity's relentless capacity to underachieve

I want to be a society vampire, you see.

[Michael] Moore doesn't really use his sense of humor that much.

I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.

I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser.

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

John Lennon was very irreverent and very intelligent.

I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.

Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler.