"He’s up there with Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken and A.J. Liebling, and not too far short of Mark Twain, as one of the great plainspoken commentators on American culture and American life."
-- Andrew O’Hehir of Salon on Roger Ebert
"Let's put it bluntly. The health, and hence the future, of our culture
is in the hands of hacks -- hacks of whom it may be said that, when they
die, it will be as though, professionally, they never lived, as though
their opinions were never expressed, as though the millions of words,
the literally millions of words, which they committed to print
during their lifetimes, failed to make the slightest impact on either
their own posterity or on that of the medium to which their careers were
dedicated. Given the stratification of our society, we have no choice
but to entrust the management of its culture industry to these hacks, as
we have no choice but to entrust our social and economic welfare to
politicians. That, however, is no reason why we should regard the former
as any more intelligent, any less obtuse, than most of us do the
latter." -- the late great Gilbert Adair on Roger Ebert
And
another great critic writes about a totally disposable one.
