Quotes from Jessica Mitford

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.

Objectivity? I always have an objective.

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.

It never occurred to me to be happy with my lot.

she was self-educated, like the great majority of women writers once were (including Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf)—haphazardly but effectively.

From our vantage point in a time when muck is being raked (and flung) vehemently and constantly twenty-four hours a day, the question of effectiveness is overwhelmed by the question of whether any person in America with access to the media remains shockable or persuadable.

Mr. Leon S. Utter, a former dean of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, has written, "Your selling plan should go into operation as soon as the telephone rings and you are requested to serve a bereaved family.… Never preconceive as to what any family will purchase. You cannot possibly measure the intensity of their emotions, undisclosed insurance, or funds that may have been set aside for funeral expenses.

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.