Quotes from Arthur Miller

Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.

Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.

Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!

We have not many wills, but only one --it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.

As a character in another Miller play (After the Fall) remarks, the past is holy. Why? Not merely because the present contains the past, but because a moral world depends on an acceptance of the notion of causality, on an acknowledgment that we are responsible for, and a product of, our actions.

You want to live? You better figure out your life.

Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?

PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!

In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. But witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature an invisible crime, is it not? The witch and the victim. None other. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself; granted? Therefore, we must rely upon her victims - and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.

Chris: For me! Where do you live, where have you come from? For me!-- I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the Goddamn business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that , the world-- the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?

There are certain people, the sicker they get the longer they live.

though our hearts break, we cannot flinch...

She catches a weakening in herself and downs it. She will not let herself be drowned in the sea that threatens her.

I don't know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer. My whole bloody life, time after time after time.

I only ask you one thing- don't trust nobody

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. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.

I'm one-dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I'm not bringing home any prizes anymore and you're going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!

Elizabeth, with great fear: I will fear nothing.

all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity

I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing. - Mary Warren

I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.

The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon—such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?