Brooks Atkinson Quotes

26 Sourced 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.

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

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

Brooks Atkinson
Nothing wholly admirable ever happens in this country except the migration of birds.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

Brooks Atkinson
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.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

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

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

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

Brooks Atkinson
Writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

Brooks Atkinson
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.

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

Brooks Atkinson
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.

Brooks Atkinson