Louis Kronenberger (December 9, 1904 – April 30, 1980) was an American literary critic (longest with Time, (1938-1961), novelist, and biographer who wrote extensively on drama and the 18th century.
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.
In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.
We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.
Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.
It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.
In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought.
The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.
The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.
In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.
Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.
London. . . remains a man's city where New York is chiefly a woman's. London has whole streets that cater to men's wants. It has its great solid phalanx of fortress clubs.
In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.
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.
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.
True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the would be sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.
The fascinating necessarily tends to call a certain attention to itself; the interesting need not. An evening spent with a fascinating person leaves vivid memories; one spent with interesting people has merely a sort of bouquet.
For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.
Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.