Louis Kronenberger

Louis Kronenberger (December 9, 1904 – April 30, 1980) was an American critic and author. He was a drama critic for Time Magazine from 1938 to 1961 and theater arts professor at Brandeis University.

Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954)

 * 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.
 * "The One and the Many", Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. 229 pages
 * Essay also appeared in Perspectives USA, Spring 1954


 * 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.
 * "The Spirit of the Age", p. 14.


 * 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 Spirit of the Age", p. 18.


 * The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.
 * p. 26.


 * In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.
 * p. 28.
 * This is a play on "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", the last line of William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood".


 * Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfilment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.
 * p. 65.


 * 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.
 * p. 76.


 * 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.
 * p. 120.


 * Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.
 * Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 122.


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

The Cart and the Horse (1964)

 * Once you have money, you can quite truthfully affirm that money isn't everything.


 * For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.


 * There are, of course, good happy endings as well as bad ones, but surely they are of a kind that in some way expresses happiness rather than glibly promises it..