Date: 1749

"The Passions, like the Managers of a Playhouse, often force Men upon Parts, without consulting, their Judgement, and sometimes without any Regard to their Talents"

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1749

"Those Persons, indeed, who have passed any Time behind the Scenes of this great Theatre, and are thoroughly acquainted not only with the several Disguises which are there put on, but also with the fantastic and capricious Behaviour of the Passions who are the Managers and Directors of this Theat...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1759

"Dr. Hutcheson was so far from allowing self-love to be in any case a motive of virtuous actions, that even a regard to the pleasure of self-approbation, to the comfortable applause of our own consciences, according to him diminished the merit of a benevolent action."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: January, 1884

"They involve no new psychic dimension, as when the transcendentalists, after letting a number of 'pure' feelings successively go 'bang,' bring their deus ex machina of an Ego swooping down upon them from his Olympian heights to make a cluster of them with his wonderful 'relating thought.'"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 2006

"None of them ever breathed / a word about the fact that this humming, / aromatic, acid flashback, pungent, tingly / fingered world is acted out differently / for each one of us by the puppet theatre / of our senses."

— Gerstler, Amy (b. 1956)

Date: June 14, 2017

"Sadly I fear that Shakespeare's 'Crassus,' now showing in the theater of my imagination, might be just as controversial as the new "Julius Caesar" were it staged as an evocation of the Trump era, since it would end with its slain-by-Parthians Crassus having molten gold, a symbol of his avarice, ...

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)