Louis Kronenberger

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

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.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

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

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

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives there can really be no civilization at all.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence and by the ignominy of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds to fail is something too awful to think about.