37 Quotes by Jessica Mitford

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening ...

lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.