Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.”

— Arthur Miller

52. “Witch-hunts are always spooked by women’s horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.”

— Arthur Miller

53. “If I have to be alone I want to be by myself.”

— Arthur Miller

54. “Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.”

— Arthur Miller

55. “The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.”

— Arthur Miller

56. “If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.”

— Arthur Miller

57. “A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud – God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!”

— Arthur Miller

58. “A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.”

— Arthur Miller

59. “A little man makes a mistake and they hang him by the thumbs; the big ones become ambassadors.”

— Arthur Miller

60. “Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”

— Arthur Miller

61. “Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. “More weight,” he says. And died.”

— Arthur Miller

62. “I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”

— Arthur Miller

63. “A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.”

— Arthur Miller

64. “I still feel-kind of temporary about myself.”

— Arthur Miller

65. “Playwriting is an oral art; it’s not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.”

— Arthur Miller

66. “A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.”

— Arthur Miller

67. “Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.”

— Arthur Miller

68. “If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

— Arthur Miller

69. “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.”

— Arthur Miller

70. “Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”

— Arthur Miller

71. “See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I’m constantly lowering my ideals...”

— Arthur Miller

72. “I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?”

— Arthur Miller

73. “The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.”

— Arthur Miller

74. “There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.”

— Arthur Miller

75. “Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.”

— Arthur Miller

76. “She catches a weakening in herself and downs it. She will not let herself be drowned in the sea that threatens her.”

— Arthur Miller

77. “In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.”

— Arthur Miller

78. “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.”

— Arthur Miller

79. “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.”

— Arthur Miller

80. “I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.”

— Arthur Miller

81. “I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears could not melt the resolution of the statutes.”

— Arthur Miller

82. “John – tell me, are we lost?”

— Arthur Miller

83. “Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?”

— Arthur Miller

84. “Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there’s no predicting what to come up with next.”

— Arthur Miller

85. “I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.”

— Arthur Miller

86. “The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”

— Arthur Miller

87. “You don’t realize how people can hate, they can hate so much they’ll tear the world to pieces.”

— Arthur Miller

88. “Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.”

— Arthur Miller

89. “I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity.”

— Arthur Miller

90. “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”

— Arthur Miller

91. “John Proctor’s flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America’s is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.”

— Arthur Miller

92. “Charley: He won’t starve. None a them starve. Forget about him. Willy: Then what have I got to remember?”

— Arthur Miller

93. “I don’t know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer. My whole bloody life, time after time after time.”

— Arthur Miller

94. “Tragedy enlightens – and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.”

— Arthur Miller

95. “Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny. A man works, raises his family, goes bowling, eats, gets old, and then he dies. Now, as the weeks passed, there was a future, there was a trouble that would not go away.”

— Arthur Miller

96. “There are certain people, the sicker they get the longer they live.”

— Arthur Miller

97. “What a woman! They broke the mould when they made her.”

— Arthur Miller

98. “Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.”

— Arthur Miller

99. “Ah, it’s a dog’s life. I only wish during the war they’d a took me in the army. I coulda been dead by now.”

— Arthur Miller

100. “There are certain men in the world who rather see everybody hung before they’ll take blame.”

— Arthur Miller