Mary McCarthy
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Trust
I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.Collection: Imagination
We are the hero of our own story.
In violence, we forget who we are.
We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
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.
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.
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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.
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
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.
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.
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a 'work' of man.
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Rights
Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Political
Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.Collection: Mad
Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.Collection: Scratches
Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships - someone always wins.Collection: Real
From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.Collection: People
most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.Collection: Education
You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.Collection: Best Love
The happy ending is our national belief.Collection: Happiness
The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.Collection: Finals
You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."Collection: Favourite
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.Collection: Good Night
Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.Collection: Retreat
I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.Collection: Work Out
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.Collection: Happiness
In violence, we forget who we areCollection: War
If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Political
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Sex
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.Collection: Real
On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.Collection: Wall