“Take criticism seriously, but not personally. If there is truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn from it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you”

—Hillary Rodham Clinton (from Living History)

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

—Ray Bradbury

“Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.”

—Anita Sarkeesian in “Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games Damsel in Distress, Part 1”

“We often feel that it is someone else who is making us unhappy, and we can become very resentful. If we look at the situation carefully, however, we will find that it is always our own mental attitude that is responsible for our unhappiness. Another person's actions make us unhappy only if we allow them to stimulate a negative response in us. Criticism, for example, has no power from its own side to hurt us; we are hurt only because of our self-cherishing. With self-cherishing we are so dependent on the opinions and approval of others that we lose our freedom to respond and act in the most constructive way.”

—Geshe Kelsang Gyatso - “Transform Your Life”

Hey guys, let’s have a discussion about criticism.

I’ll put it under a read more just in case you don’t care.

Read More →

“A typical Siskel and Ebert program reviewed five films. Either Mr. Ebert or Mr. Siskel would introduce a clip and then give his opinion. Then the other would weigh in. Their disagreements were more entertaining than their agreements, complete with knitted brows, are-you-serious head-shaking and gentle (or not so) barbs. Mr. Siskel once taunted Mr. Ebert about his weight: “Has your application for a ZIP code come through yet?” Mr. Ebert came back with a dart about Mr. Siskel’s receding hairline: “The only things the astronauts saw from outer space were Three Mile Island and your forehead.”

—The New York Times, “Roger Ebert, Popular Film Critic, Dies at 70’

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development....When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”
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