Louis Kronenberger Quotes

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.

Coyness is a rather comically pathetic fault, a miscalculation in which, by trying to veil the ego, we let it appear stark naked.

Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

The technique of winning is so shoddy, the terms of winning are so ignoble, the tenure of winning is so brief; and the specter of the has-been-a shameful rather than a pitiable sight today-brings a sudden chill even to our sunlit moments.

London ... remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.

The life of sense begins by assuming that we can only fitfully live the life of reason.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

Ours is the country where, in order to sell your product, you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.

Having disciples is in the end like having children, only not with love but with self-love preeminent.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.

We might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be considered a good guy.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.