Brooks Atkinson Quotes

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.

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.

This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less; you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.

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.

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

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

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.

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

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

We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.

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

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.

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

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.