Mary McCarthy Quotes

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a “work” of man.

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

In violence, we forget who we are.

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

If someone tells you he is going to make a “realistic decision,” you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.

I’m afraid I’m not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you’ve given away trade secrets.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that you really must make the self.