Brooks Atkinson Quotes

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

I really don't think in the past. I sit down with many friends at dinner, and they like to talk about the good old days. I'm respectful of the good old days, but I find myself spending very little time reminiscing. I'm really looking forward.

Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

I spent a good amount of my time - like a lot of guys my age - obsessing and blowing things up with G.I. Joes. I know it well.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

Eventually, competition and adventure wane, and I enter my ibuprofen phase. Tweaky hamstrings and achy knees restrict mileage, but I continue running for health, sanity, and the ritual of a Sunday trail run with like-minded buddies. We discuss the nagging injuries that bedevil us, and remember the good old days when we were kings.

One of the things you learn in football is that you're only as good as your last outing. I don't like to reflect on what we've done in the past. I'm not a very good storyteller, for one thing. I'd disappoint you. When it's time, I'll talk about the good old days. But it's a sign of old age, reveling in the past.

I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

When there's so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you've already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?

The good old days are now.

We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

Happy memories … need to be put in context. I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross examined these memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.