The Penguin Arthur Miller Quotes

“The house is two stories high and has seven rooms. It would have cost perhaps fifteen thousand in the early twenties when it was built.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“LEBEAU: How about some solidarity with Gypsies? Just because they don’t work nine to five? WAITER—a small man, middle-aged, still wearing his apron: I know this one. I’ve made him go away a hundred times. He and his wife stand outside the café with a baby, and they beg. It’s not even their baby. LEBEAU: So what? They’ve still got a little imagination.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“BAYARD: How can you say that? Hitler is the creation of the capitalist class. VON BERG, in terrible mourning and anxiety: But they adore him! My own cook, my gardeners, the people who work in my forests, the chauffeur, the gamekeeper—they are Nazis! I saw it coming over them, the love for this creature—my housekeeper dreams of him in her bed, she’d serve my breakfast like a god had slept with her; in a dream slicing my toast! I saw this adoration in my own house! That, that is the dreadful fact. Controlling himself: I beg your pardon, but it disturbs me. I admire your faith; all faith to some degree is beautiful. And when I know that yours is based on something so untrue—it’s terribly disturbing. Quietly: In any case, I cannot glory in the facts; there is no reassurance there. They adore him, the salt of the earth. . . . Staring: Adore him.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“BAYARD—looks at Von Berg for a moment, then addresses all: I don’t understand it, but take my advice. If anything like that happens and you find yourself on that train . . . there are four bolts halfway up the doors on the inside. Try to pick up a nail or a screwdriver, even a sharp stone—you can chisel the wood out around those bolts and the doors will open. I warn you, don’t believe anything they tell you—I heard they’re working Jews to death in the Polish camps. MONCEAU: I happen to have a cousin; they sent him to Auschwitz; that’s in Poland, you know. I have several letters from him saying he’s fine. They’ve even taught him bricklaying. BAYARD: Look, friend, I’m telling you what I heard from people who know. Hesitates. People who make it their business to know, you understand? Don’t listen to any stories about resettlement, or that they’re going to teach you a trade or something. If you’re on that train get out before it gets where it’s going.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“You wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on, would you? BAYARD, shaking his head: I was walking down the street. LEBEAU: Me too. Something told me—Don’t go outside today. So I went out. Weeks go by and I don’t open my door. Today I go out. And I had no reason, I wasn’t even going anywhere. Looks left and right to the others. To Bayard: They get picked up the same way?”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“Who worked for nothin’ in that war? When they work for nothin’, I’ll work for nothin’. Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go if I go! That’s why you can’t tell me.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“BAYARD: My friend, without the Red Army standing up to them right now you could forget France for a thousand years! LEDUC: I agree. But that does not require an understanding of political and economic forces—it is simply faith in the Red Army.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“MONCEAU: In my opinion you’re hysterical. After all, they were picking up Jews in Germany for years before the war, they’ve been doing it in Paris since they came in—are you telling me all those people are dead? Is that really conceivable to you? War is war, but you still have to keep a certain sense of proportion. I mean Germans are still people.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“LEBEAU: Well I’m not a philosopher, but I know my mother, and that’s why I’m here. You’re like people who look at my paintings—“What does this mean, what does that mean?” Look at it, don’t ask what it means; you’re not God, you can’t tell what anything means. I’m walking down the street before, a car pulls up beside me, a man gets out and measures my nose, my ears, my mouth, the next thing I’m sitting in a police station—or whatever the hell this is here—and in the middle of Europe, the highest peak of civilization! And you know what it means? After the Romans and the Greeks and the Renaissance, and you know what this means?”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“MOTHER: What more can we be! CHRIS: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“CHRIS: The great roué! KELLER: What is that, roué? CHRIS: It’s French. KELLER: Don’t talk dirty. They laugh. CHRIS, to Ann: You ever meet a bigger ignoramus? KELLER: Well, somebody’s got to make a living. ANN, as they laugh: That’s telling him. KELLER: I don’t know, everybody’s gettin’ so Goddam educated in this country there’ll be nobody to take away the garbage. They laugh. It’s gettin’ so the only dumb ones left are the bosses. ANN: You’re not so dumb, Joe. KELLER: I know, but you go into our plant, for instance. I got so many lieutenants, majors, and colonels that I’m ashamed to ask somebody to sweep the floor. I gotta be careful I’ll insult somebody. No kiddin’. It’s a tragedy: you stand on the street today and spit, you’re gonna hit a college man.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“ANN: Nobody was dressed so he drove over to the depot to pick up my brother. SUE: Oh, your brother’s in? ANN: Yeah, they ought to be here any minute now. Will you have a cold drink? SUE: I will, thanks. Ann goes to table and pours. My husband. Too hot to drive me to beach.—Men are like little boys; for the neighbors they’ll always cut the grass.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“MOTHER: You think just because you like everybody, they like you!”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“And then I came home and it was incredible. I . . . there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a—bus accident. I went to work with Dad, and that rat-race again. I felt . . . what you said . . . ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you’ve got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“That’s only a little thing . . . but . . . that’s the kind of guys I had. They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today. And I got an idea—watching them go down. Everything was being destroyed, see, but it seemed to me that one new thing was made. A kind of . . . responsibility. Man for man.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“once upon a time I used to think that when I got money again I would have a maid and my wife would take it easy. Now I got money, and I got a maid, and my wife is workin’ for the maid.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“FRANK: That boy’s going to be a real doctor; he’s smart. JIM: Over my dead body he’ll be a doctor. A good beginning, too. FRANK: Why? It’s an honorable profession. JIM, looks at him tiredly: Frank, will you stop talking like a civics book? Keller laughs. FRANK: Why, I saw a movie a couple of weeks ago, reminded me of you. There was a doctor in that picture . . . KELLER: Don Ameche! FRANK: I think it was, yeah. And he worked in his basement discovering things. That’s what you ought to do; you could help humanity, instead of . . . JIM: I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“FRANK, peeved: The trouble with you is, you don’t believe in anything. JIM: And your trouble is that you believe in anything. You didn’t see my kid this morning, did you?”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“LEDUC, with higher urgency, but deeply sympathetic; to Monceau: Listen to me for one moment. I beg you. There is only one man guarding that door; we may never get another chance like this again. LEBEAU: That’s another thing; if it was all that serious, wouldn’t they be guarding us more heavily? I mean, that’s a point. LEDUC: That is exactly the point. They are relying on us. MONCEAU: Relying on us! LEDUC: Yes. To project our own reasonable ideas into their heads. It is reasonable that a light guard means the thing is not important. They rely on our own logic to immobilize ourselves.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“MONCEAU: It was an absolutely idiotic accident. I was rooming with another actor, a gentile. And he kept warning me to get out. But naturally one doesn’t just give up a role like that. But one night I let myself be influenced by him. He pointed out that I had a number of books which were on the forbidden list—of Communist literature—I mean things like Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Mann, and even a few things by Friedrich Engels, which everybody was reading at one time.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“VON BERG: No, no, I never had any interest in that direction. Slight pause. Of course, there is this resentment toward the nobility. That might explain it. LEDUC: In the Nazis? Resentment? VON BERG, surprised: Yes, certainly.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“CAPTAIN: Try to avoid taking anybody out of a crowd. Just cruise around the way we did before, and take them one at a time. There are all kinds of rumors. We don’t want to alarm people.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“MARCHAND, leaning forward to see Monceau: You would think, though, that with the manpower shortage they’d economize on personnel. In the car that stopped me there was a driver, two French detectives, and a German official of some kind. They could easily have put a notice in the paper—everyone would have come here to present his documents. This way it’s a whole morning wasted. Aside from the embarrassment. LEBEAU: I’m not embarrassed, I’m scared to death. To Bayard: You embarrassed?”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“JIM, gets up: Chris would never know how to live with a thing like that. It takes a certain talent . . . for lying. You have it, and I do. But not him.”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

“Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world—the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in the world? What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you? What must I do to you? I ought to tear the tongue out of your mouth, what must I do?”
― Arthur Miller, The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays