Self Critique Quotes

The health of an enlightened and progressive society is measured by how vibrant is its science fiction, since that is where true self-critique and appraisal and hope lie. ~ David Brin

I DRAW A HOT SORROW BATH IN MY DESPAIR ROOM WITH A MISERY CANDLE BURNING I WASH MY HAIR WITH REGRET SHAMPOO AFTER CLEANING MYSELF WITH PAIN SOAP I DRY MYSELF WITH MY GORGEOUS WHITE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AND IT WILL NEVER CHANGE TOWEL THEN SMOOTH ON MY I DON'T DESERVE LOTION AND I HATE MYSELF FACE CREAM THEN I PUT ON MY ALONE AGAIN SILK PYJAMAS AND GO TO SLEEP WHEN THE HUE HAS GONE BLUE AND YOU CAN'T QUITE GRIN AND BEAR IT LET THIS WORD PICTURE REMIND YOU IT CAN ALWAYS BE WORSE ~ Keanu Reeves

We each possess the ability to engage in self-healing through contemplation and self-analysis. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche's late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist , to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety. ~ John Carroll

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. ~ Jennifer Baumgardner

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients' texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions. ~ Mark S. Smith

I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation. ~ Judith Butler

To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change. ~ Bell Hooks

Critique don't criticize. ~ A.D. Posey

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. ~ Theodor Adorno

Men=earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other's company even for thinking ("freedom of the pen")=first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment. ~ Hannah

And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, "You'd better hurry then, you know how how is," and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in thier marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage
which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn
simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.
A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself. ~ Alice McDermott

Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality". ~ Tony Judt

A good read is like thanksgiving dinner. Some come to stuff their faces and leave fat and happy. Others come to critique everything from the turkey to the place settings. And those special few come to see how its done and hope for the chance to one day make their own. So that others can get fat and happy. ~ Red Mattos

I'd suggest that what J R documents is the way that America is hollowing out the foundation necessary to even read a book like it, an America that teaches its children via closed-circuit television, an America that thinks democracy means owning a share of profit-maximizing publicly traded corporations. This is what it means to say that J R is about the conditions underlying the impossibility of its own reception. If there were a welcoming mass public for books like this, a public able to appreciate its beautiful difficulty and astonishing imagination, we wouldn't live in the sort of world so in need of savage satirical critique in the first place. ~ Lee Konstantinou

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. ~ Michel Foucault

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking. ~ Elliott Liu

Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry - angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The ~ Eliot Nelson

Imagine America as one house on a suburban lane. Years before he became a Jehovah's Witness, Prince knocked on America's door through his music. He came to the door holding a guitar and an umbrella while concealing a Bible. He flirted his way inside the door and told us he had a dirty mind and was controversial, and then he sat down in the living room on the good couch. And, when America's guard was down, because we thought we were having a conversation about sex, Prince eased out his Bible and said, "Let me also tell you about my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. ~ Toure

Well, I'm not defining good and bad art, except, that art that appeals to me or repels me is good. Art that bores me is bad. ~ Lucien Carr

My critique of how we deal with drugs in society is just that - that we use these anecdotes to apply to everyone and the anecdotes are not representative. ~ Carl Hart

I don't want anyone to get seriously hurt. But I do watch awards shows to critique the clothes while I sit around eating chips in my sweat pants and in hopes of seeing some hilarious accidental nudity. ~ Eliza Coupe

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments. ~ John Carroll

It is not surprising that young white males – most between thirty and forty – play major roles in the production of hip-pop. It's easy to forget this because when most people critique rap and hip-pop harshly, they assume that young black men are the sole creators and producers of misogynist rap. In fact, nothing is unilaterally produced anymore. As we've discussed, once you have a corporate takeover of the street culture, it is no longer the property of the young, Black and Latino men and women who have created it. It is reinvented with the mass consumer audience in mind. The hard-core misogyny and the hard-core sexism isn't a translation from street to big-time studio, it is a product of the big-time studio. ~ Bell Hooks

I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you'll read these stories and it'll be like 'What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?' And of course the point is that they don't, and they wouldn't, because they don't have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There's a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there - which I find fascinating and interesting and cool. ~ Lev Grossman

My relationship with the journalists who covered the campaign was complicated. I often hid from the critical eye of their cameras and their omnipresent digital recorders, wary of the critique implicit in every captured moment. But I also grew to respect and understand their passion for their work, their love for the journey we were sharing. ~ Alexandra Kerry

We live in the world with you. We do not forsake forum or bath or workshop, or inn, or market, or any other place of commerce. We sail with you, fight with you, farm with you. ~ Tertullian

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. ~ Michel Foucault

The answer is not to expand Lies My Teacher Told Me to cover every distortion and error in history as traditionally taught, to say nothing of the future lies yet to be developed. That approach would make me the arbitrator - I who surely still unknowingly accept all manner of hoary legends as historical fact. Instead, the answer is for all of us to become, in Postman and Weingartner's vulgar term, 'crap detectors' - independent learners who can sift through arguments and evidence and make reasoned judgements. Then we will have learned how to learn, as Postman and Weingartner put it, and neither a one-sided textbook nor a one-sided critique of textbooks will be able to confuse us. ~ James W. Loewen

If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Everybody has a part of her body that she doesn't like, but I've stopped complaining about mine because I don't want to critique nature's handiwork ... My job is simply to allow the light to shine out of the masterpiece. ~ Alfre Woodard

Critique my better work only, because I want to get better from my best, not better from my worst. ~ Jarod Kintz

Peggy thinks men are disgusting animals with no impulse control, and that women should avoid relying on them for emotional support. It took a long time for it to dawn on Marianne that Peggy was using the guise of her general critique of men to defend Jamie whenever Marianne complained about him. What did you expect? Peggy would say. ~ Sally Rooney

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He's weak ... he's unsure of himself ... he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. ~ Jean Baudrillard

I don't say things straight into the other person's face. I kind of like to make a joke or a remark and make it digestible or just give a little comment that voices my concern, but is not meant to be a critique, but just a comment so that he understands that I am thinking. ~ Christoph Waltz

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes. ~ Peter Kreeft

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. ~ Daniel Quinn

So what's your alternative? people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor. ~ China Mieville

The gargantuan, ever-growing, ever-less-accountable, impossible-to-uproot federal bureaucracy is actually the sleeper issue of our time. It's at the heart of the conservative critique of modern government: faceless bureaucrats writing incomprehensible regulations that complicate our lives for no good reason. ~ Jim Geraghty

All churches must understand, love, and identify with their local community and social setting, and yet at the same time be able and willing to critique and challenge it. ~ Timothy Keller

The fallacy in the progressive critique is the egalitarian dogma that no one should get more than what liberals deem is a 'fair' reward, nor should there be any risk to anyone to fail. ~ Robert Agostinelli

Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive heroic light. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was a blatant rejection of the good girl/bad girl binary and even offered a critique of the good girl role. ~ Tim Hanley

This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. ~ Hal Duncan

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography. ~ John Waters

But anyone can write, right?'" Conner asked. "I mean, that's why authors get judged so harshly, isn't it? Because technically everyone could do it if they wanted to."
"Just because anyone can do something doesn't mean everyone should," Mrs. Peters said. "Besides, anyone with an Internet connection feels they have the credentials to critique or belittle anything these days. ~ Chris Colfer

You can critique her writing, but not her lifestyle. ~ Lisi Harrison