Louis Kronenberger

Louis Kronenberger was an American critic and author. He was a drama critic for Time Magazine from 1938 to 1961 and theater arts professor at Brandeis University.

Sourced

• 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.
  • "The One and the Many", Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1955)

• Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.
  • The Cart and the Horse (1964)

• The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.
  • Company manners: a cultural inquiry into American life‎ - page 26, de Louis Kronenberger - Published by Bobbs-Merrill, 1954 - 229 pages

Unsourced

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

• Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

• Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

• It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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