Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Arthur Miller
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Arthur Miller
Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.

Arthur Miller
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

Arthur Miller
I have not moved from there to here without I think to please you, and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

Arthur Miller
A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

Arthur Miller
Hale: Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits — your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now — we shall find him out if he has come among us, and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!
Rebecca: Will it hurt the child, sir?
Hale: I cannot tell. If she is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free.

Arthur Miller
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Arthur Miller
Hale: There is a prodigious fear of this court in the country —
Danforth: Then there is a prodigious guilt in the country. Are you afraid to be questioned here?
Hale: I may only fear the Lord, sir, but there is fear in the country nevertheless.
Danforth: Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!
Hale: But it does not follow that everyone accused is part of it.
Danforth: No uncorrupted man may fear this court, Mr. Hale!

Arthur Miller
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

Arthur Miller
A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

Arthur Miller
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

Arthur Miller
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

Arthur Miller
I am inclined to notice the ruin in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy.

Arthur Miller
What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!

Arthur Miller
He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!

Arthur Miller
When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

Arthur Miller
You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit.

Arthur Miller
Ben, that funeral will be massive! They'll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the old-timers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he'll see it with his eyes once and for all.

Arthur Miller
I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play — but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

Arthur Miller
After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

Arthur Miller
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Arthur Miller
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.

Arthur Miller
I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

Arthur Miller
My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Arthur Miller
The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

Arthur Miller
Chris: I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

Arthur Miller
When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. … No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

Arthur Miller
Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.

Arthur Miller
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Arthur Miller