Arthur Miller Quotes

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.

If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.

We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.

Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!
- Abigail

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

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

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

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!

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

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

They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.

I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.

I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of man's worthlesseness - 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.

It is mistaken law that leads you to sacrifice. Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. I beg you, woman, prevail upon your husband to confess. Let him give his lie. Quail not before God's judgment in this, for it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride.