Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.

George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) was an influential American drama critic and editor, best known for shaping early-20th-century theatrical taste through magazines such as The Smart Set and (with H. L. Mencken) The American Mercury. Nathan’s epigrammatic style—sharp, skeptical, and often paradoxical—suited the period’s appetite for witty, aphoristic commentary on art and public life. This remark reflects the professional world he inhabited: criticism as a public performance in which the critic’s temperament, standards, and self-regard inevitably color judgments of others. The line circulates widely in quotation collections as a characteristic Nathanism about the critic’s limitations and biases.

The aphorism suggests that criticism is rarely a neutral measurement of a work’s intrinsic worth; instead, it is a projection of the critic’s own “value”—their taste, competence, moral outlook, and even insecurity. To “appraise others at one’s own value” implies that the critic uses the self as the yardstick, so the judgment reveals as much about the judge as the judged. Nathan’s sting is double-edged: it punctures the authority critics claim while also warning audiences to read criticism diagnostically, as evidence of a critic’s standards and character. The line remains relevant wherever evaluation is entangled with status, identity, or self-justification.