Daily Inspiration Quote by Brooks Atkinson

Atkinson lands the blade gently, then twists: the problem isn’t that people are fooled, it’s that they collaborate. “Enjoy believing” reframes credulity as pleasure-seeking, not intellectual failure. The sentence is built like a diagnosis of a bad habit - not an accident - and it’s aimed less at the gullible than at the comfortable. You can hear the critic’s ear for stagecraft: the audience knows the set is painted wood, yet still wants the illusion because the illusion asks less of them than reality does.

The subtext is moral, not merely psychological. Atkinson pairs “thinking for themselves” with “taking responsibility,” suggesting that independent thought isn’t an abstract virtue; it’s a bill that comes due. To know something is false and keep it anyway is a way of outsourcing agency - letting the tribe, the newspaper, the party line, the fashionable consensus carry the weight of decision. That’s why “ordeal” matters: he’s describing the labor and loneliness of forming judgments without the cushion of permission.

In context, Atkinson wrote through the era of mass media’s consolidation, wartime propaganda, and the early Cold War’s loyalty tests - moments when public belief wasn’t just personal comfort but civic infrastructure. As a theater critic, he also watched how narratives discipline crowds: repetition, applause cues, heroes and villains. His warning is that democracy can start to look like entertainment when citizens prefer a satisfying script to an unsettling fact, and call it innocence rather than choice.