Critical Discourse Quotes

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.

Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.

Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don't get that critical of a government that's leading us in war time.

If the opportunity offers, the Cynic [philosopher] must speak up on the public platform …. You must be able to explain to individuals as well as to a crowd of people the battle they're embroiled in

To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Critics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and that’s why no one cares about them anymore.

I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

We need to discuss what our own standards are for games writing that falls outside of journalism, and support experimental formats and routes of production that may be more tailored to them than the status quo, because the public at large seems to still think that the only games writing that exists are reviews and news.

For 18 months after September 11, it was unpatriotic to criticize the President. That is how he was able to lead us into the War in Iraq. In normal times the proposed war would never have withstood the criticism.

Now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

The problem that we have in America now is, some people only see the positive stuff and wave off the toxic stuff, and some people only see the toxic stuff and wave off the positive stuff. You can't have an honest conversation.

Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

Sarcasm all around the world is always against right wing and against people in power. That's the definition of political sarcasm.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

This country is about, in my judgment, aggressive, open debate. There is an old saying: When everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking very much.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

My ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along.

There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.