Arthur Miller Quotes

161 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.

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

Arthur Miller
An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation.

Arthur Miller
It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.

Arthur Miller
THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.

Arthur Miller
There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

Arthur Miller
Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

Arthur Miller
The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.

Arthur Miller
So many tremendous decisions in life are made because it is five o'clock.

Arthur Miller
When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back.

Arthur Miller
Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

Arthur Miller
Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

Arthur Miller
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.

Arthur Miller
It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.

Arthur Miller
Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.

Arthur Miller
If you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?

Arthur Miller
Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

Arthur Miller
A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.

Arthur Miller
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

Arthur Miller
A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.

Arthur Miller