Criticism
Critiques were voiced in the western press and by Khomeini and his followers – Khomeini called it the "Devil's Festival.". Expenses were said to be as high as $200 million, while the Ministry of the Court placed the cost at $17 million; Ansari, one of the organizers, puts it at $22 million. The actual figure is difficult to calculate exactly and is a partisan issue. The defenders of the activities point out other benefits such as the opening of 3,200 schools, improvements in infrastructure, and the positive effect on Iran's international public relations.
Read more about this topic: 2,500 Year Celebration Of The Persian Empire
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)