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All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.

George Jean Nathan

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George Jean Nathan
Age: 76 †
Born: 1882
Born: February 14
Died: 1958
Died: April 8
Critic
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Fort Wayne
Indiana
Raises
Regards
Regard
Platform
Necessary
Platforms
Lift
Floor
Lifts
Stupidity
Imbecility
Raise
Profundity

More quotes by George Jean Nathan

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A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.
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I drink to make other people interesting.
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A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
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An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
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Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.
George Jean Nathan
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Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
George Jean Nathan
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It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
George Jean Nathan
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An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
George Jean Nathan
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A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
George Jean Nathan
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The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers.
George Jean Nathan
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I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
George Jean Nathan
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Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.
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The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.
George Jean Nathan
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The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.
George Jean Nathan
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An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.
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Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.
George Jean Nathan
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It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.
George Jean Nathan
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A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
George Jean Nathan
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Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
George Jean Nathan
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One does not go to the theater to see life and nature one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
George Jean Nathan