110+ Mary McCarthy Quotes On Education, Religion And Communism

Mary McCarthy was an American author and critic who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. She is best known for her 1963 novel The Group, which chronicles the lives of eight Vassar graduates from 1933 to 1940. Her other works include Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, The Company She Keeps, and How I Grew. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mary McCarthy on education, religion, love.

Top 10 Mary McCarthy Quotes

1. 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.
2. Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
3. In violence we forget who we are.
4. Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
8. If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
9. The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.
10. 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.

Mary McCarthy Short Quotes

• What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
• In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.
• Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
• Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
• The happy ending is our national belief.
• Congress
• it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
• It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
• Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.
• In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak.

Mary McCarthy Quotes About Education

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. — Mary McCarthy

most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant. — Mary McCarthy

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

Mary McCarthy Quotes About Love

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting. — Mary McCarthy

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. — Mary McCarthy

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were? — Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy Quotes About People

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children. — Mary McCarthy

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

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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

Mary McCarthy Quotes About Life

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room. — Mary McCarthy

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

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

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

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. — Mary McCarthy

...friendship...is essential to intellectuals. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. — Mary McCarthy

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. — Mary McCarthy

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. — Mary McCarthy

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

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

Mary McCarthy Quotes About World

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. — Mary McCarthy

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. — Mary McCarthy

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy Famous Quotes And Sayings

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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

You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese." — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past. — Mary McCarthy

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

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

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

The furniture and trappings in the apartment are all in a state of flux - here today, gone tomorrow. Nothing is anchored to its place, not even the coffee-pot, which floats off and returns, on the tide of the signora's marine nature. — Mary McCarthy

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth. — Mary McCarthy

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others. — Mary McCarthy

We are the hero of our own story. — Mary McCarthy

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character. — Mary McCarthy

The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul. — Mary McCarthy

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

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the. — Mary McCarthy

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

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

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. — Mary McCarthy

...the tourist Venice is Venice. — Mary McCarthy

... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain. — Mary McCarthy

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation. — Mary McCarthy

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

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse! — Mary McCarthy

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate. — Mary McCarthy

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. — Mary McCarthy

Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation. — Mary McCarthy

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. — Mary McCarthy

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

It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic—in a bad sense—elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I'm only half joking. — Mary McCarthy

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

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. — Mary McCarthy

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it. — Mary McCarthy

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. — Mary McCarthy

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. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want. — Mary McCarthy

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

Life Lessons by Mary McCarthy

1. Mary McCarthy's works emphasize the importance of being true to oneself, as well as the need to stay open-minded and tolerant of others.
2. She also encourages readers to think critically and to question the status quo, as well as to strive for personal growth and self-improvement.
3. Lastly, she stresses the need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to always strive to make the world a better place.