After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
– Brooks Atkinson
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
– Brooks Atkinson
Ethel Waters, the flaming tower of dusky regality, who knows how to make a song stand on tiptoe.
– Brooks Atkinson
Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.
– Brooks Atkinson
In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
– Brooks Atkinson
In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.
– Brooks Atkinson
It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.
– Brooks Atkinson
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
– Brooks Atkinson
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.
– Brooks Atkinson
The cocktail party... is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.
– Brooks Atkinson
There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
– Brooks Atkinson
We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
– Brooks Atkinson
The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.