Four Americans Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman Quotes

“he warns it against the besetting sin of university dons and the learned and lettered class in general, a supercilious, patronizing attitude towards the men of action who are doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.... Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.”
― Henry Augustin Beers, Four Americans Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman