Quotes from Lillian Hellman

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

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

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

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.

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

I am most willing to answer all questions about myself… But… I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of telling the truth.

Lonely people talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

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

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

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.

I was so often silent angry with Hammett for making the situation hard on me, not knowing then that the dying do not, should not, be asked to think about anything but their own minute of running time.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

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

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.

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.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

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.

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

Freedom costs you a great deal.