Ruling On Criticism

Silence is safer than speech. - Epictetus

Impropriety is the soul of wit. - W Somerset Maugham

When the age is in, the wit is out. - William Shakespeare

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. - Cormac McCarthy

Children need models rather than critics. - Joseph Joubert

A proverb is to speech what salt is to food. - Arabic Proverb

Tears at times have all the weight of speech. - Ovid

Speech is the vestibule to the palace of love. - Jami of Persia

The best road to progress is freedom's road. - John F Kennedy

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech. - Martin Fraquhar Tupper

You have a ready wit. Let me know when it's ready. - Henny Youngman

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. - Clifton Fadiman

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. - W Somerset Maugham

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism. - Wole Soyinka

All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech. - Robert Frost

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. - Oscar Wilde

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. - Ayn Rand

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together. - Max Eastman

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. - Rosa Luxemburg

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. - Thomas Carlyle

Common sense is just as good a critic of the lottery as any statistical breakdown. - Hunter Baker

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade. - Noel Coward

Freedom rings when you realize you can become what you never thought you could become. - Richie Norton

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech. - George Bernard Shaw

If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all. - Noam Chomsky

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose. - Thornton Wilder

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else. - Erica Jong

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch, and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it. - Aldous Huxley

Perfect freedom is as necessary to the health and vigor of commerce as it is to the health and vigor of citizenship. - Patrick Henry

Freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down the fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged. - Alice Walker

The greatest advantage I know of being thought a wit by the world is that it gives one the greater freedom of playing the fool. - Jonathan Swift

Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. - Mary Catherwood

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. - Sigmund Freud

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. - John Keats

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own. - Margaret Atwood

A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about. - Newt Gingrich

When my time on Earth is gone and my activities here are past, I want that they should bury me upside down so my critics can kiss my ass. - Bobby Knight

I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. - Yasser Arafat

We have believed - and we do believe now - that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible. - Indira Gandhi

Doing and saying the right thing are not sufficient. Doing the right thing in the right way and with the person's comfort in mind is critical. - Ravi Zacharias