Jessica Mitford Quotes

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

Lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening ...