Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.

Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.

The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

If you're living in a dystopia, you don't necessarily want to look at another one.

Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

It's so funny: whenever there's a new technology introduced, there's always this fear it's going to end entertainment as we know it. When records came around, they were going to be the end of live music. Nobody would ever want to go see live music again.

If you put your mind to it, anything is possible.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

Right and wrong are not relative terms. There are fundamental truths. Evil flourishes, but good men continue to battle it - and win.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.

Everything happens in the kitchen. Life happens in the kitchen.

A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one's gifts and talents, is what truly matters.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher's pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.

Serving jury duty is a fascinating little slice of life, with its motley crew of personalities.

Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.

Julius Caesar was an aristocrat who sided with the Roman people. He's not my hero, but he was one of a long line of what we'll call 'populares,' which were popular leaders who tried to institute these reforms that the people were fighting for.

There is a minimum requirement of morality, of moral compass, of decency, of moral empathy. And if you are incapable of meeting that minimum requirement, you can't even talk to me about policy.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Every mind is a clutter of memories, images, inventions and age-old repetitions. It can be a ghetto, too, if a ghetto is a sealed-off, confined place. Or a sanctuary, where one is free to dream and think whatever one wants. For most of us it's both - and a lot more complicated.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.

At the 'L.A. Times,' I always wanted to write about artists I thought were meaningful. So I interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eminem, White Stripes. And I could understand how almost everybody I interviewed had a sense of artistry.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Being gifted needs courage.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.

Nothing ever quite dies, it just comes back in a different form.

Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

Exhibitions are kind of ephemeral moments, sometimes magic moments, and when they're gone, they're gone.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.

For one, the Qur'an is considered by Muslims to consist entirely of words spoken by Allah himself.

The power of pop culture stories should not be underestimated, and there is an enormous potential for inspirational stories that can have a positive, transformative effect on our lives.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy.

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype--a metaphor for itself.

Dumbo... makes me cry. Every single time and in the exact same spot. I just have a special affection for Dumbo.