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: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Any second rate English society novelist could have written this story better than F. Scott Fitzgerald though no one could have touched his best chapters. Is it laziness, indifference, a lack of standards, or imperfect education that results in this constant botching of the first rate by American novelists?”

Saturday Review of Literature

“…none of the characters in this book is made sufficiently measurable at the beginning to give to his later downhill course anything more than mildly pathetic interest.

William Troy, The Nation

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

Mark Twain Hadn’t Seen Anything Yet

“Virtue has never been as respectable as money.”

Mark Twain

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

Elbert Hubbard on Making Oneself Obsolete

“The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

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

Rotten Reviews: Moses and Monotheism

The book is poorly written, full of repetitions, replete with borrowings from unbelievers, and spoiled by the author’s atheistic bias and his flimsy psychoanalytic borrowings.”

Catholic World

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

George Orwell on Commercial Speech

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”

George Orwell

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

Albert Einstein’s Self-Assessment

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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

George Jean Nathan on the Shortcomings of Criticism

“Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the author’s fame.”

George Jean Nathan

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

Rotten Reviews: A Passage to India

“Spiritually it is lacking in insight.”

Blanche Watson, The World Tomorrow

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

Rotten Reviews: The Recognitions

“The main fault of the novel is a complete lack of discipline… It is a pity that, in his first novel, Gaddis did not have stronger editorial guidance than is apparent in the book, for he can write very well, even though most of the time he just lets his pen run on.”

Kirkus Reviews

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

Some Important Words for Our Time from George S. Counts

“To refuse to face the task of creating a vision of a future America immeasurably more just and noble and beautiful than the America of today is to evade the most crucial, difficult, and important educational task.”

George S. Counts (1889-1874) As Quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)

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