Brooks Atkinson Quotes

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

#American Critic #College

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

#People #American Critic

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.

#American Critic

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

#Birthday #American Critic

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

#American Critic #Age And Aging

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

#Life #American Critic

The most fatal illusion is the narrow point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

#American Critic #Growth

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside

#Men

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

#American Critic #Democracy

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

#Man

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work

#Work

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers

#Man

There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.

#American Critic #Joy

When Mr. Wilbur calls his play 'Halfway to Hell,' he underestimates the distance.

#Hell

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

#American Critic

In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.

#Optimism

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.

#Churches

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

#Photography