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.
The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.
One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.
Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.
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.
A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.
Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.
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.
Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.
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.
Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?
Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.
The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
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. Americans are almost as fearful of being thought eccentric as the English of not seeming like the genuine article. I once knew an Englishman who refused to go out on Easter Monday for fear of being detected in London when all the right people would be elsewhere; but when he went forth on less dangerous occasions, his get-ups were such as no American would wear to a dogfight.
He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.
With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.