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Praise without merit is more harmful than unearned criticism.

Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Unearned
Harmful
Merit
Criticism
Praise
Without

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.
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Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
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Marlon Brando is the most influential movie actor of the century.
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Never marry anyone you could not sit next to during a three-day bus trip.
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I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric apparently, people don't have any ideas of their own. And there's just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.
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People send me e-mails saying, You're a movie critic. You don't know anything about politics. Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
Roger Ebert
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Sometimes you only need to have a few words with a person to know you would like to have many more.
Roger Ebert
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There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.
Roger Ebert
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We must try to contribute joy to the world.
Roger Ebert
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I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.
Roger Ebert
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Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.
Roger Ebert
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I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.
Roger Ebert
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Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film.
Roger Ebert
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The Lucky One is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.
Roger Ebert
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The film argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more.
Roger Ebert
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If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
Roger Ebert
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Teenagers used to go to the movies to see adults having sex. Today adults go to the movies to see teenagers having sex.
Roger Ebert
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If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.
Roger Ebert
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To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.
Roger Ebert
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It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
Roger Ebert