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Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.

Brooks Atkinson

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Brooks Atkinson
Age: 89 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1984
Died: January 14
Author
Critic
Journalist
Bay State
Justin Brooks Atkinson
Life
Guilt
Burden
Daily
Shame
Penalize
Heavy
Reluctant
Caught
Mixed
Conscience
Carries
Everyone
Carrie

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There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
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Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.
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Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.
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The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.
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Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.
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I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.
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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.
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There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.
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Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
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Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
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The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.
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Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self-reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way.
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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.
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In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting there are only uninterested people.
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There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.
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The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
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The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.
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Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
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Say Yes to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say Yes to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say Yes to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.
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This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
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