LOUIS KRONENBERGER

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.

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.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

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.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

The technique of winning is so shoddy, the terms of winning are so ignoble, the tenure of winning is so brief; and the specter of the has-been-a shameful rather than a pitiable sight today-brings a sudden chill even to our sunlit moments.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.

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.

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.

On any morning these days whole segments of the population wake up to find themselves famous, while, to keep matters shipshape, whole contingents of celebrities wake up to find themselves forgotten.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

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?

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Temperament, like liberty, is important despite how many crimes are committed in its name.