Brooks Atkinson Quotes

Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.

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.

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

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

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.

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 the public as its enemy.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

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.

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

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

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

The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people.

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 or plots.

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

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

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 it.

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

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.

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 of cutting each others throat.

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

New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

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

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 living.

The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life.

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 unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.

There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.

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.

Life is seldom as unendurable as to judge by the facts it logically ought to be.

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

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.