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.

Legendary Journalist I.F. Stone Explains Government

Posted on July 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Samuel Beckett

Posted on July 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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James Bryant Conant on What Our Schools Can Be

Posted on July 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: Samuel Johnson

Posted on July 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“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.

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Rotten Reviews: The End of the Road by John Barth

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“The same road that has been traveled with Kerouac and to an extent Herbert Gold, this was for those schooled in the waste matter of the body and the mind; for others, a real recoil.”

Kirkus Reviews

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

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Rotten Reviews: Catch-22

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Heller wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.”

Whitney Balliet, The New Yorker

“There is a great difference, after all, between milking a joke (the great gift of all comedians) and stretching it out till you kill it. Mr. Heller has enough verve not to have to try so hard to be funny.”

William Barrett, Atlantic Monthly

“…it gasps for want of craft and sensibility…. The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.”

New York Times Book Review

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

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George Bernard Shaw on the Dismal Science and Its Practitioners

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

George Bernard Shaw

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

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Aristotle on the Elements of an Education

Posted on July 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

“At present there are differences of opinion…for all peoples do not agree as to the things that the young ought to learn, either with a view to virtue or with a view to the best life, nor is it clear whether their studies should be regulated more with regard to intellect or to regard to character.”

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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

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