Lillian Hellman quotes

Lillian Hellman was an influential American playwright and screenwriter known for her socially conscious and confrontational works. Her plays often addressed issues like injustice, corruption, and personal integrity. She became a prominent literary and political figure, noted for both her artistic achievements and her outspoken political activism. Here are 45 of her quotes:

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lillian Hellman

People change and forget to tell each other.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

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

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

Lillian Hellman

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Lillian Hellman

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.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.

Lillian Hellman

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Lillian Hellman

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

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

I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the fifth amendment at the hearing.

Lillian Hellman

Sad is a fake word for me to be using, I am still angry that their reason for disagreeing with McCarthy was too often his crude methods.... Many of the anti-Communists were, of course, honest men. But none of them... has stepped forward to admit a mistake. It is not necessary in this country; they too know that we are a people who do not remember much. I have written here that I have recovered. I mean it only in a worldly sense because I do not believe in recovery. The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman

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

Lillian Hellman