Louis Kronenberger Quotes

• 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.
• For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.
• Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.
• Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.
• It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.
• Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
• Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
• Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
• 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.
• Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.
• The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.
• 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.
• The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.
• 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.
• 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.
• Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

louis kronenberger