110+ Arthur Miller Quotes On Marilyn Monroe, Crucible And Mccarthyism

Arthur Miller was an American playwright who wrote works such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that explore the struggles of the common man. His works often tackled themes of social injustice and explored the consequences of the American Dream. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Arthur Miller on marilyn monroe, crucible, life.

Top 10 Arthur Miller Quotes

1. Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
2. I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.
3. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!
4. I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.
5. An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
6. The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
7. The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
8. A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
9. No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.
10. A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.

Arthur Miller Short Quotes

• Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.
• Suicide kills two people.
• ... vulgarity has no nation.
• Without alienation, there can be no politics.
• Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.
• I'm sure there are writers who are great businessmen, but I never met any.
• A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.
• Be liked and you will never want.
• A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.
• He's liked, but he's not well liked.

Arthur Miller Quotes About Crucible

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven. — Arthur Miller

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer. — Arthur Miller

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it. — Arthur Miller

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name! — Arthur Miller

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him! — Arthur Miller

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone. — Arthur Miller

Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now. — Arthur Miller

There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more. — Arthur Miller

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Quotes About Life

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. — Arthur Miller

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author. — Arthur Miller

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life. — Arthur Miller

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. — Arthur Miller

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke. — Arthur Miller

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism. — Arthur Miller

Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake. — Arthur Miller

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity. — Arthur Miller

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been. — Arthur Miller

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long. — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Quotes About Love

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. — Arthur Miller

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back. — Arthur Miller

I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match. — Arthur Miller

... if you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries? — Arthur Miller

Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh. — Arthur Miller

Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story. — Arthur Miller

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

You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return. — Arthur Miller

The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars. — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Quotes About Writing

One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives. — Arthur Miller

Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions. — Arthur Miller

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not? — Arthur Miller

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out. — Arthur Miller

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning. — Arthur Miller

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always. — Arthur Miller

Rise early. Write. Disappoint your sons. Read the newspaper. Go to bed early. Success. — Arthur Miller

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always. — Arthur Miller

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from. — Arthur Miller

My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much. — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Quotes About Play

The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships. — Arthur Miller

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem. — Arthur Miller

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality. — Arthur Miller

. . usually, the biggest problems of adapting plays into screenplays is that they stick too close to the play, and I think film is a completely different medium. I think a novel is much closer to a film. — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Quotes About Talking

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. — Arthur Miller

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. — Arthur Miller

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen. — Arthur Miller

A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great. — Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller Famous Quotes And Sayings

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through. — Arthur Miller

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes. — Arthur Miller

The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past. — Arthur Miller

And old Dave, he'd go up to his room, y'understand, put on his green velvet slippers - I'll never forget - and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. — Arthur Miller

If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that. — Arthur Miller

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one's environment. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. — Arthur Miller

Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away. — Arthur Miller

When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man. — Arthur Miller

Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow. — Arthur Miller

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. — Arthur Miller

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks. — Arthur Miller

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act. — Arthur Miller

The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that. — Arthur Miller

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive. — Arthur Miller

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone. — Arthur Miller

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime. — Arthur Miller

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker? — Arthur Miller

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. — Arthur Miller

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping. — Arthur Miller

Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents. — Arthur Miller

When a deposit bottle is broken, you don't get your nickel back. — Arthur Miller

When the guns roar, the arts die. — Arthur Miller

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action? — Arthur Miller

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit. — Arthur Miller

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am. — Arthur Miller

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not. — Arthur Miller

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man. — Arthur Miller

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead. — Arthur Miller

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. — Arthur Miller

I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life. — Arthur Miller

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line. — Arthur Miller

The jungle is dark but full of diamonds, Willy. — Arthur Miller

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil. — Arthur Miller

The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress — Arthur Miller

Tragedy enlightens - and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. — Arthur Miller

It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors. — Arthur Miller

Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere. — Arthur Miller

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect. — Arthur Miller

An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation. — Arthur Miller

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead! — Arthur Miller

You cant get very far in this world without your dossier being there first. — Arthur Miller

He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world. — Arthur Miller

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness. — Arthur Miller

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

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed. — Arthur Miller

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing. — Arthur Miller

A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors. — Arthur Miller

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something. — Arthur Miller

Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died. — Arthur Miller

Life Lessons by Arthur Miller

1. Arthur Miller taught the importance of standing up for what is right, even in the face of adversity. He showed that it is possible to fight for justice, even when the odds are stacked against you.
2. He also emphasized the power of personal responsibility, and how one person can make a difference in the world.
3. Finally, Miller showed that it is possible to find hope and beauty in the darkest of times, and that it is important to never give up on your dreams.