457 Quotes by Arthur Miller

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.

If I have any justification for having lived it’s simply, I’m nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There’s some value in that.

Elizabeth, with great fear: I will fear nothing.

Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.

He wants to live on through something – and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. All of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

Your blanket is all torn because it’s old.” “It is not old,” Jane said. “But it is old,” Jane’s mother said. “We bought it when you were born. And then we had to wash it lots of times. And we washed it and washed it, and now it is all worn out. Look, you have a nice new big blanket. You don’t need that old blanket. That old blanket is like a rag now, darling.

Tragedy enlightens – and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.

Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.