97+ Lillian Hellman Quotes On Education, Death And Death And Dying

Lillian Hellman was an American dramatist, screenwriter, and memoirist. She wrote some of the most successful plays of the twentieth century, including The Little Foxes and The Children's Hour. She was also a political activist, and her memoirs, An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento, are considered classics of the genre. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lillian Hellman on education, love, life.

Top 10 Lillian Hellman Quotes

1. People change and forget to tell each other.
2. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
3. It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.
4. Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.
5. For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
6. I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
7. We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
8. Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
9. Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.
10. Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Lillian Hellman Image Quotes

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Short Quotes

• Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.
• My father was often angry when I was most like him.
• It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.
• Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
• How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.
• Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.
• One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.
• You lose your manners when you're poor.
• Callous greed grows pious very fast.
• A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.

Lillian Hellman Quotes About Life

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier. — Lillian Hellman

The happy problem of our time - longer life. — Lillian Hellman

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Quotes About People

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do. — Lillian Hellman

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? — Lillian Hellman

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do. — Lillian Hellman

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast. — Lillian Hellman

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour. — Lillian Hellman

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute. — Lillian Hellman

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them? — Lillian Hellman

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat. — Lillian Hellman

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it. — Lillian Hellman

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Quotes About Truth

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. — Lillian Hellman

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth. — Lillian Hellman

We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth. — Lillian Hellman

Was it always in my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success becomes an accident and failure seemed the only truth? — Lillian Hellman

The judgment of music, like the inspiration for it, must come slow and measured, if it comes with truth. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Quotes About Writing

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. — Lillian Hellman

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. — Lillian Hellman

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped. — Lillian Hellman

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty. — Lillian Hellman

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book. — Lillian Hellman

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. — Lillian Hellman

The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Quotes About Writers

I don't think many writers like their best-known piece of work, particularly when it was written a long time ago. — Lillian Hellman

Writers talk too much. — Lillian Hellman

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Quotes About Conscience

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. — Lillian Hellman

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions — Lillian Hellman

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion. — Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman Famous Quotes And Sayings

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? — Lillian Hellman

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell. — Lillian Hellman

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be. — Lillian Hellman

It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip. — Lillian Hellman

I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery. — Lillian Hellman

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create. — Lillian Hellman

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice. — Lillian Hellman

failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field. — Lillian Hellman

Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous. — Lillian Hellman

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men. — Lillian Hellman

Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault? — Lillian Hellman

Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live. — Lillian Hellman

A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own. — Lillian Hellman

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair. — Lillian Hellman

I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done. — Lillian Hellman

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all. — Lillian Hellman

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not. — Lillian Hellman

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes. — Lillian Hellman

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America. — Lillian Hellman

Freedom costs you a great deal. — Lillian Hellman

You can't recover from what you do not understand. — Lillian Hellman

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself. — Lillian Hellman

Styles in wit change so. — Lillian Hellman

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in. — Lillian Hellman

We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a love affair in the end. — Lillian Hellman

You don't always know how to do things when they're happening. — Lillian Hellman

It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured. — Lillian Hellman

Fashions in sin change. — Lillian Hellman

as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself. — Lillian Hellman

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now. — Lillian Hellman

You can always spot clothes made in a good place. — Lillian Hellman

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did. — Lillian Hellman

The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead. — Lillian Hellman

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing. — Lillian Hellman

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie. — Lillian Hellman

My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much. — Lillian Hellman

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that. — Lillian Hellman

the convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money. — Lillian Hellman

Fear comes with middle age. — Lillian Hellman

Everybody's got a habit. — Lillian Hellman

People always sound so proud when they announce they know nothing of music. — Lillian Hellman

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant. — Lillian Hellman

If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point. — Lillian Hellman

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight. — Lillian Hellman

If someone had told me, don't say anything about Lillian Hellman because she'll sue you, it wouldn't have stopped me. It might have spurred me on. — Lillian Hellman

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking. — Lillian Hellman

Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else. — Lillian Hellman

Life Lessons by Lillian Hellman

1. Lillian Hellman taught the importance of standing up for your beliefs and not being afraid to challenge the status quo.
2. She also showed that it is possible to remain true to yourself, even in the face of adversity.
3. Hellman's work is a reminder to never give up, no matter how difficult the situation may seem.