Top 1112 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Critics - Page 19

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.

I'm retiring because my time is up.

The beauty of design ought to be totally incidental to the enterprise itself.

I always think shooting dance is a sort of test of a filmmaker.

In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago, in that eating has become incredibly political. And just as the street has always dictated fashions on music and other things, it’s starting to happen that way in food.

The mission of '8 Mile' is essentially to garner sympathy for a white rapper involved in an old-school shootout - a rap contest. This may be the final frontier for pop, more unbelievable than the prospect of launching a member of 'N Sync into orbit.

Unless I move to a desert island with poor reception, I'll never stop speaking out!

The Bible may be more than an ordinary human book but it's not less, and the same principles therefore apply in interpreting it as in interpreting what my wife wants me to do. Only the stakes are even higher!

... a little philosophy carries a man from God, but a great deal brings him back again.

All you'll get from strangers is surface pleasantry or indifference. Only someone who loves you will criticize you.

I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Opera stars know that biology is destiny. Sometime in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears.

People do tend to be extremely skeptical, especially of YouTubers - and rightly so.

For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.

You don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.

When you look at a work of art, you don't see a cover for something else; you see revelation. If you're an artist, art is the truest expression of yourself. Even if you're painting a life you don't have.

China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the U.N. Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights.

If a natural disaster like a flock of birds or a bolt of lightning causes a plane's engines to fail, you know what should be expected? That the pilot will keep his or her wits about them and do their best to save each and every soul on board. That's precisely what Captain 'Sully' Sullenberger and the rest of his crew did.

A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.

The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.

There are two things over which you have complete dominion, authority, and control – your mind and your mouth.

I hate Nassau and the Bahamas. It's one of those places I'd always wanted to visit since reading Ian Fleming but it was full of casinos with Americans in shorts.

The frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign.