Praise and Criticism
Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, describes Baker as "...like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)
Noam Chomsky accused Baker of "genocide denial with a vengeance" after the latter praised the work of Edmund Morgan, who wrote: "In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants." Chomsky notes that Morgan's figure of one million is "off by many tens of millions", meaning he and Baker are denying the genocide of many millions of indigenous Americans.
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Famous quotes containing the words praise and, praise and/or criticism:
“The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no Pleasure like that of receiving Praise from the Praiseworthy.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)