“Today our knowledge of the past is increasing at an unprecedented rate, and this at both ends of its ever- lengthening vista. The archaeologists are making history by exhuming buried and forgotten civilizations as fast as the politicians are making it by taking new action for contemporary historians to study.”
Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) As quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
(It’s important to remember that at the time of its publication, Moby Dick met mixed critical reception, to say the least; it really didn’t emerge as the classic it is now regarded until around 1921, when critics, beginning with Carl Van Doren, reappraised the novel as a masterpiece.)
“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact…Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his errors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature–since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist,”
Athenaeum
“Redburn was a stupid failure, Mardi was hopelessly dull, White Jacket was worse than either; and, in fact, was such a very bad book, that, until the appearance of Moby Dick whe had set it down as the very ultimatum of weakness to which the author could attain. It seems, however, that we were mistaken. In bombast, in caricature, in rhetorical artifice–generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual–and in low attempts at humor, each of his volumes has been an advance upon its predecessors.”
Democratic Review
“The captain’s ravings and those of Mr. Melville are such as would justify writ de lunatico against all parties.”
Southern Quarterly Review
“…a huge dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimentalism, and track-comic bubble and squeak.”
William Harrison Ainsworth, New Monthly Magazine
“This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad….”
The Spectator
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”
Saul Bellow
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Surely there is enough for everyone within this country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.”
Jonathon Kozol Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only….”
New York Herald Tribune
“A little slack, a little soft, more than a little artificial, The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels.”
Springfield Republican
“Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking…. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as a romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”
Saturday Review of Literature
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“There are many objectionable passages and references. I am sorry not to be able to recommend this book for the subject is an important one.”
L.R. Etzkorn, on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in Library Journal
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest, he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”
New Statesman
“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”
Times Literary Supplement
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Idealism is the noble toga that that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
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