To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

-Anonymous
Inscription on a pillow given Claudia ('Lady Bird')  Johnson by her staff. Quoted in Life,  Apr1995.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

-Arnold, Matthew
  Essays in Criticism First Series,'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'.

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

-Arnold, Matthew
  Essays in Criticism Second Series,'Wordsworth'.

It issaid that England invented the phrase,'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polityas administration itself. 51

-Bagehot,Walter
  The English Constitution, ch.2,'The Cabinet'.

To many, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

-Brown,John Mason
  Stagebill.

A great deal of contemporary criticism readsto me like a man saying: 'Of course I do not like green cheese: I am very fond of brown sherry'.

-Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)
  All I Survey,'On  Jonathan Swift'.

I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise.

-Coward, Sir Noe«  l Peirce
Attributed.

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art† The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

-Dewey,John
  Art as Experience.

So two cheers for democracy: one because it admits varietyand two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
Two Cheers for Democracy,'What I Believe'. The phrase'Love the Beloved Republic' is taken from Swinburne's poem'Hertha'.

Think beforeyouspeak iscriticism'smotto; speak before you thinkcreation's.

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
Two Cheers for Democracy,'Raison d'e"  tre of Criticism'.

The father of English criticism.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
^81  Of Dryden. Lives of the English Poets,'Dryden'.

I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

-Stockton
  In the Wall Street  Journal,13  Aug.

Impersonal criticism†is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

-Nathan, GeorgeJean
Quoted in Charles  Angoff (ed)  The World of George Jean Nathan (1952).

The essential characteristic of philosophy, which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life; it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it onlyaccepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, there is no reason for rejecting them.

-Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl
  The Problems of Philosophy, ch.14.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world,öthough the cant of hypocrites may be the worst,öthe cant of criticism is the most tormenting.

-Sterne, Laurence
^67  Tristram Shandy, bk.3, ch.12.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetryas hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

-Updike,John Hoyer
  HuggingThe Shore, foreword.

As far as criticism is concerned, we don't resent that unless it is absolutely biasedöas it is in most cases.

-Vorster,John originally Balthazar Johannes Vorster
  In the Observer, 9 Nov.