Critical Quotes

1. "To have faith in the Word, Scripture must not grasp us in our critical thought, but in the life of the soul."
Author: Abraham Kuyper

2. "I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know."
Author: Ann Druyan

3. "I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye."
Author: Annabelle Selldorf

4. "Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer."
Author: Barry López

5. "..Critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love."
Author: Bell Hooks

7. "Man can refuse to cooperate, but he cannot keep God from executing the critical events on His schedule."
Author: Beth Moore

8. "In the aftermath of September 11th, it is critical to secure our borders."
Author: Bobby Jindal

9. "You're wrong, you know," Susan said. "She doesn't belong here. I'm against the death penalty. I don't think the state should be in the business of killing people. I think it's wrong. And it's hypocritical. Mostly, I just think it's mean. Gretchen Lowell ? She is the exception. She deserves to die. If we kill one person, one criminal in the history of the world, it should be her." Susan paused, reconsidering. "And Hitler. Her, and Hitler". Prescott had that shrink look on his face again, passive and unimpressed, and yet somehow judgmental at the same time. Susan continued. "She removed a detective's spleen without anesthesia. She stuck a wire through an old woman's eyeball and then threaded it behind her nose and out through the other eye socket and then she stuck the wire into an outlet."Prescott raised an eyebrow. "And you're arguing that she's sane?"
Author: Chelsea Cain

10. "Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy."
Author: Clarence Thomas

11. "Don't bury personal obsessions. Capitalize on them. ``The connection between personal obsession and the work you do is the most important thing.''-- Be yourself. ``Singularity is what you need.''-- Avoid self-censorship: ``We are very self-critical in a way that can be very destructive. In our culture there are voices in our head which have taught us to say, `Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you.' Don't ever think about anybody peering over your shoulder.''-- Don't be afraid to show off, even if you think, ``I'm very close to making a complete fool of myself.''-- Don't be afraid to entertain. ``I want to entertain. I don't want to lose people. I feel responsible as I write to give people the best time I can.''-- ``Love your failures'' instead of beating yourself up over them.-- ``Learn to love the process'' of writing.-- Just do it. Barker likes something director Stanley Kubrick said: ``If you want to make a film, pick up a camera."
Author: Clive Barker

12. "Developing a diet that is healthful, balanced, and appropriate for your particular caloric needs is easy enough and is absolutely critical to establishing a healthful lifestyle that incorporates proper nutrition, adequate fitness, and mental resilience."
Author: Daphne Oz

13. "A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted."
Author: David E. Wilkins

14. "You can't defend the indefensible - anything you say sounds self-serving and hypocritical."
Author: Diane Abbott

15. "If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos."
Author: Gary William Flake

16. "I found out that colonels can stay until they drop dead or get a walker and being a critical medical specialty as an Army trained emergency room doctor, I could stay until age 67."
Author: Gerald Griffin

17. "Religion and morality are critical to how students think about politics and form opinions on political issues."
Author: Jeanne Shaheen

18. "There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward."
Author: Jeremy Northam

19. "Part of abandoning the all-or-nothing mentality is allowing yourself room for setbacks. We are bound to have lapses on the road to health and wellness, but it is critical that we learn how to handle small failures positively so that we can minimize their long-term destructive effects. One setback is one setback—it is not the end of the world, nor is it the end of your journey toward a better you."
Author: Jillian Michaels

20. "An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought."
Author: John Dewey

21. "The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie."
Author: John Frankenheimer

22. "The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis."
Author: Julia Kristeva

23. "But somehow things took a sinister turn, and the division of labor came to be understood as the demarcation of a social hierarchy. Women kept busy with numerous domestic responsibilities while their male counterparts' sole duty was tending to the flocks. Men had time to think critically, form political infrastructures, and ultimately, network with other men. Meanwhile, women were kept too busy to notice that somewhere along the line, they had become inferior. This is approximately when shit hit the fan."
Author: Julie Zeilinger

24. "Irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde…"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing…. Irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. That was it exactly—Irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say."
Author: Lewis Hyde

25. "All Australians understand that high-quality, reliable and affordable broadband is a critical part of the infrastructure our nation needs to prosper in coming years."
Author: Malcolm Turnbull

26. "I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. "Wretch!" I said, "it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power."
Author: Mary Shelley

27. "The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ."
Author: Megan McKenna

28. "I believe in the critical importance of participating in the political system - from voting to standing for election. It's both rewarding and necessary that men and women of good will and clear thinking engage in honest, open debate."
Author: Michael Nutter

29. "Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in."
Author: Michael S. Kimmel

30. "The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight."
Author: Murray Bookchin

31. "Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that."
Author: Myles Horton

32. "He was telling the students about the hypnotic technique of using quotes in a conversation. An idea is more palatable ... if it comes from someone else. "The unconscious thinks in terms of content and structure. If you introduce a pattern with the words, 'My friend was telling me,' the critical part of her mind shuts off."
Author: Neil Strauss

33. "What a joke, coming from a woman who worked for the fashion industry. Really. Starving yourself to fit into a size zero — why did that size even exist? Zero referred to the absence of something, but what did it mean in terms of a model's measurements? Her fat? Or her presence? How much could you cut away before the person herself vanished? It was hypocritical, that's what it was. I said as much, adding, "If you're so keen on me being healthy then you should have no problem accepting me for the way I am. That's what's healthy, Mom. Not being focused on all this freaky weight-loss stuff."
Author: Nenia Campbell

34. "The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
Author: Paul De Man

35. "I used some vivid language that, if I could take it back, I'd take it back. It's not my intention to be personally critical of the President or of anyone else."
Author: Paul O'Neill

36. "Entrusting your dreams or aspirations to the wrong person could be a critical mistake, lest they mistreat or neglect them. We are not nearly as careful with our dreams as we should be."
Author: Ramani Durvasula

37. "That first responsibility as a school board member - meals for latch-key children - was absolutely critical in my understanding of the extraordinary problems of poverty."
Author: Richard Lugar

38. "With over 1 billion users and counting worldwide, the Internet has quickly become a critical place for individuals, business communities and governments to share and distribute information."
Author: Robin Hayes

39. "At its heart shamanism is an ouroboros that, regardless ofcultural or religious trappings that have crowded its path, whatremains its critically profound gift to the present lies in itssimplistic roots of the past."
Author: S. Kelley Harrell

40. "The sun of that chilishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time."
Author: Saul Bellow

41. "Consider how the rich countries of the world are filled with hypocritical people. These are the people who complain about children who are starving in Somalia, and speak of the plight of youth in the inner city, speaking as though they are emotionally tortured by these tragedies. But then they refuse to do a thing about it. When they are approached by charities, they give only an infinitesimal fraction of their wealth."
Author: Shmuley Boteach

42. "Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella"
Author: Steven Novella

43. "There exists a sac of skin that distends when I'm tired, beneath my eye. Irreversible tissue damage. Something stretched too far, which has come back changed. I've thought of having it surgically corrected. Michael swears it's unnoticeable, the tiny pouch of loose skin. Yet not long ago, seeing me stare critically into a mirror one morning after a late night, he offered to pay to have it removed with lasers.I declined. I didn't tell him that I need it, in some perverse way. A reminder that you can never, for any reason or length of time, no matter how much you love or believe you love, change someone.That believing you can might end you."
Author: Suzanne Finnamore

44. "If people who cherish freedom, who know the importance of mutual respect and are aware of the imperative necessity to establish a constructive and critical debate, if these people are not ready to speak out, to be more committed and visible, then we can expect sad, painful tomorrows. The choice is ours."
Author: Tariq Ramadan

45. "While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance."
Author: Thomas E. Mann

46. "It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!"
Author: Thomas Hardy

47. "People will pay a price for putting political obstruction over progress in a time that is so critical and urgent."
Author: Tim Kaine

48. "There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other:1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law).The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

49. "Remind me to thank God I don't have a sister."Caine eyed him critically. He was a filthy heap of blood and soot and sand stuck to the gun oil on his face. "Yeah," without much enthusiasm. "I'll thank Him for ya."
Author: V.S. Carnes

50. "Recruitment and retention are critical to sustain our Armed Forces with the best men and women willing to stand in the gap and make huge sacrifices to ensure our freedom."
Author: Zack Wamp

Critical Quotes Pictures