Arthur Miller Quotes

John – tell me, are we lost?

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

The house is two stories high and has seven rooms. It would have cost perhaps fifteen thousand in the early twenties when it was built.

all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity

to go, Pop. Every muscle is ready. WILLY [at the edge of the apron]: You realize what

Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it

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.

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect. No tragedy can therefore come about when its author fears to question absolutely everything, when he regards any institution, habit or custom as being either everlasting, immutable or inevitable. In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there's nobody o live in it.

Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it better. But the truth is holy, and even as I known how wrong he was, and his death useless, I tremble, for I confess that something perversely pure calls to me from his memory- not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be! And so I mourn him- I admit -with a certain... alarm.

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. When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regarded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapses; when we see the steady and methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man’s worthlessness — until redeemed — the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church-state.

The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.