Mary McCarthy quotes

Mary McCarthy was an influential American novelist, critic, and political activist. Her witty and incisive writing brought sharp insights into politics, culture, and society. She became famous for works like "The Group" and was known for her outspoken views and literary criticism. Here are 109 of her quotes:

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.

Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.

Mary McCarthy

The happy ending is our national belief.

Mary McCarthy

We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour in other words, we are the hero of our own story.

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

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

Mary McCarthy

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

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

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

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

Mary McCarthy

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

Mary McCarthy

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

Mary McCarthy

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Mary McCarthy

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

Mary McCarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

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

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mary McCarthy

If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

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

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

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

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.

Mary McCarthy