(44 quotes found)
“Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard”
Mary McCarthy
“Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.”
“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”
“To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.”
“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.”
“In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”
“Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a ''work'' of man.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
