Arthur Miller Quotes

Now remember what the angel Raphael said to the boy Tobias. Remember it.
'Do that which is good,and no harm shall come to thee.

The growing sensitivity of people to any sort of open and frank discussion of important issues is no service to civilisation, let alone law and order. I wrote a play about a man who happened to be a salesman, and several organisations of sales people flew to arms. Now it is the lawyers. If I am to back away from these objections you must surely see that I shall be forced to write about people with no occupation whatever.

most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory

My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.

Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water — that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

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.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

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

I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

"I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing." - Mary Warren

Be loving to him. Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor.

But you didn't rest your mind. your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear

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.