37 Quotes by Jessica Mitford

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.