George Jean Nathan (February 14, 1882 - April 8, 1958) was the leading American drama critic of his time. Active from 1905 to 1958, he published 34 books on the theatre, co-edited The Smart Set and The American Mercury with H.L. Mencken, and zealously practiced 'destructive' theatre criticism. (Click here for full biography)
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A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
An optimist is the kind of person who believes a housefly is looking for a way out.
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
I drink to make other people interesting.
I hold that companionship is a matter of mutual weaknesses. We like that man or woman best who has the same faults we have.
It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.
No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
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
Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
Politics is the pursuit of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
Ten million dollars worth of intricate and ingenious machinery
functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
(re: Hollywood)
What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency.
Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.
Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.
Categories: George Jean Nathan, Quotes of the day
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