155 Quotes by Lillian Hellman

You don’t always know how to do things when they’re happening.

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don’t start the earthquakes and don’t stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that’s all we can promise in truth.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Everybody’s got a habit.

Success and failure are not true op-posites and they’re not even in the same class; they’re not even a couch and a chair.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

It doesn’t pay well to fight for what we believe in.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one’s own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.