Louis Kronenberger (1904 – 1980)
American critic and author.
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Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.
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.
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.
The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.
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.
The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.
There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.
On a very rough-and-ready basis 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. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit […] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.
Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.
For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.
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.
Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.
It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.
Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.
In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.
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