Brooks Atkinson

Critic

1894-11-28 – 1984-01-14

American theatre critic and journalist best known as the chief drama critic of The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama criticism in 1947.

Quotes by Brooks Atkinson

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.
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Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.
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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.
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Nothing wholly admirable ever happens in this country except the migration of birds.
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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.
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I have no objection to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.
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I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with Gods work.
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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.
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It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
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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.
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Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
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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.
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Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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