Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Rotten Reviews: Babbitt

“As a humorist, Mr. Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly. In fact, it is as yellow a novel as novel can be.”

Boston Evening Transcript

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

James Baldwin on Education as a Consciousness Raising Process

(Aside: Have you seen I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about James Baldwin’s abandoned book, Remember This House? It’s a fine film, richly deserving of all the fulsome praise it has garnered. I highly recommend it.)

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

James Baldwin “The Negro Child—His Self Image” in The Saturday Review (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Rotten Reviews: Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

“As the publishers say, it is a sympathetic and understanding study of a young man struggling with his soul. It might be even more sympathetic if Author Bellow (who is not in the Army) ever seemed to suspect that, as an object of pity, his hero is a pharisaical stinker.”

Time

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Rotten Reviews: Max Beerhohm

He is a shallow, affected, self-conscious fribble–so there.”

Vita Sackville-West, letter to Harold Nicolson, 1959

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Legendary Journalist I.F. Stone Explains Government

“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

I.F. Stone

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

Rotten Reviews: Samuel Beckett

“In attempting to depict the boredom of human existence, he has run the very grave risk of thoroughly boring his reader.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“The suggestion that something larger is being said about the human predicament…won’t hold water, any more than Beckett’s incontinent heroes can.”

The Spectator

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

James Bryant Conant on What Our Schools Can Be

“Religious tolerance, mutual respect between vocational groups, belief in the rights of the individual, are among the virtues that the best of our high schools now foster.”

James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) as quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Rotten Reviews: Samuel Johnson

“I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson’s Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists.”

Noah Webster, letter, 1807

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Rotten Reviews: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material–or even challenging it–he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface life of Paris.”

The Dial

“…leaves one with the feeling that the people it describes really do not matter; one is left at the end with nothing to digest,”

The New York Times

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

Rotten Reviews: Emile Zola on Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire

“In a hundred years the histories of French literature will only mention (this work) as a curio.”

Emile Zola, in Emile Zola 1953

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.