Quotes by Arthur Miller

“The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

“Now we settle for half and I like it better.”

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

cleave not to faith when faith brings blood. - Rev. John Hale

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

When it is recalled that until the Christian era the underworld was never regardded as a hostile area, that all gods were useful and essentially friendly to man despite occasional lapsesl when we see the steady methodical inculcation into humanity of the idea of mans worthlesseness - until redeemed - the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants, and who is better than the minister. - Rev. John Hale

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

I dont know what the hell Im workin for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent Im paying. And its crazy. But then, its what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, Im lonely.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.

Proctor: I am only wondering how I may prove what she told me, Elizabeth. If the girls a saint now, I think it is not easy to prove shes fraud, and the town gone so silly. She told it to me in a room alone- I have no proof for it.Elizabeth: You were alone wit

Will you let me go for Christs sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.

Chris: I dont know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.

Im losing weight, you notice, Pop?

The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without sky. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out Gods beard and the Devils horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.