Arthur Miller Quotes

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 and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!

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!

All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon — such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

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

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy.

I like it not that Mr. Parris should lay his hand upon my baby. I see no light of God in that man. I'll not conceal it.

It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. … much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness.

A child's spirit is like a child, you cannot catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.

Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!

A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time — we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.

He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.