"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."
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Quote collection
Arthur Miller quotes (page 2 of 11)
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"When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion."
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"If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment."
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"The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less."
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"I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know."
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"The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always."
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"Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed."
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"The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility."
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"And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere."
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"The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians."
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"As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished."
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"Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author."
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"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."
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"When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing."
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"Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard."
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"Suicide kills two people."
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"The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can't get out of within."
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"Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven."
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"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."
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"Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume."
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