Mary McCarthy Quotes

The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that
one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she
hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her
proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she ad-
ministered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will
outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch
a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed
this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a
"parvenu," an "upstart," an "adventurer," a politician was al-
ways "cheap," and an opportunist "vulgar." But the proletariat
did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V.
What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him-
self the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his 
sanity questioned.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.

His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

It came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it.

I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind ...

If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.

Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people's hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.

I mean exactly that," Mr. Davison retorted. "You've hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position" - he turned to Kay - "have 'privilege.' That's what I read in the Nation and the New Republic." Mrs. Davison nodded. "Good," said Mr. Davison. "Now listen. The fellow who's got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

In violence we forget who we are.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

Every subsequent moral crisis of my life, moreover, has had precisely the pattern of this struggle over the first Communion, I have battled, usually without avail, against a temptation to do something which only I knew was bad, being swept on by a need to preserve outward appearances and to live up to other people's expectations of me.

With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.

I understand what you are feeling," he said. "As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.

You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

Who are the advertising men kidding, besides the European tourist? Between the tired, sad, gentle faces of the subway riders and the grinning Holy Families of the Ad-Mass, there exists no possibility of even a wishful identification.

Be truthful ... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.

If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect.

Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words you are the hero of your own story.

All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn't express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it - in other men's words.

I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failure, but by a wicked heart. Insensitiveness, opacity, inability to make connections, ofter accompanied by low "animal" cunning. One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will--an active preference, and that explains why one is so irritated by stupidity, which is not the case when one is dealing with a truly backward individual.

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.

Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

The group was not afraid of being radical either; they could see the good Roosevelt was doing, despite what Mother and Dad said; they were not taken in by party labels and thought the Democrats should be given a chance to show what they had up their sleeve.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people ...

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.

You have to live without love, learn not to need it in order to live with it.

Love had done this to her, for the second time. Love was bad for her. There must be certain people who were allergic to love, and she was one of them. Not only was it bad for her; it made her bad; it poisoned her. Before she knew him, not only had she been far, far happier but she had been nicer. Loving him was turning her into an awful person, a person she hated.

The average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.

In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.

We are the hero of our own story.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.

Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

The happy ending is our national belief.

Most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.

It [Socialism] was a kind of political hockey played by big, gaunt, dyspeptic girls in pants.

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.