Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Quotes

“Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.”

“We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.”

“In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.”

“Wonder, as a quality of intellect, has fallen from favor.”

“Wonder feeds our best intelligence and is perhaps its source.”

“In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class husband and wife or a single parent over $10,000 a year.”

“You have always given me more than I gave to you. You were the wings on which I soared.Lotte Lehmann”

“The interest in the supernatural in a very generic sense and in the spiritual is not in itself a factor that helps the communication of the Christian faith.”

“One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.”

“A bookshelf is a biography written by others.”