Brooks Atkinson Quotes

40 quotes in 588 categories

• The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.
• Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to…
• Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.
• It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.
• Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard…
• In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.
• Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his…
• There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that…
• Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
• Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in…
• We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy…
• 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.…
• There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
• Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world…
• New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers.
• It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
• Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.
• After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
• 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…

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