Arthur Miller Quotes

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it.

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

To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off.

You're pulling heaven down, and raising up a whore!

it's the proper morning to fly into Hell.

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.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.

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.

MAGGIE, in pain: That’s what I mean; I’m a joke to most people.

QUENTIN: No, it’s that you say what you mean, Maggie. You don’t seem to be upholding anything, you’re not — ashamed of what you are.

MAGGIE: W-what do you mean, of what I am?

… But you didn’t, did you?

He turns to her in agony.

Laugh at me?

QUENTIN: No. He suddenly stands and cries out to Listener. Fraud! From the first five minutes! …Because! I should have agreed she was a joke, a beautiful piece, trying to take herself seriously! Why did I lie to her, play this cheap benefactor, this — Listens, and now unwillingly he turns back to her.

MAGGIE: Like when you told me to fix where my dress was torn? You wanted me to be — proud of myself. Didn’t you?

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.

John Proctor’s flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America’s is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.

I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.