Louis Kronenberger Quotes

Louis Kronenberger delivers blunt, critical takes on culture, ethics and media that will make you question everyday habits.

29 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.

#1
For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

#2
Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

#3
Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

#4
It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

#5
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

#6
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

#7
Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

#8
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.

#9
Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

#10
The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

#11
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.

#12
The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

#13
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.

#14
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.

#15
Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

#16
In art, there are tears that do lie too deep for thought.
Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.
The truly ambitious are always as busy on the landings as they are breathless on the stairs.
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.
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.
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
If it is the great delusion of moralists to suppose that all previous ages were less sinful than their own, then it is the great delusion of intellectuals to suppose that all previous ages were less sick.
The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.
With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.
In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.
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.
Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.
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.