Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they’re both about father-son relationships.”

— Arthur Miller

52. “Elizabeth, with great fear: I will fear nothing.”

— Arthur Miller

53. “I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.”

— Arthur Miller

54. “The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.”

— Arthur Miller

55. “Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.”

— Arthur Miller

56. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

59. “I’m losing weight, you notice, Pop?”

— Arthur Miller

60. “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

61. “A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.”

— Arthur Miller

62. “Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.”

— Arthur Miller

63. “Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn’t do is die. It has to be killed.”

— Arthur Miller

64. “What ideology, I wondered, was not based on a principled denial of the facts?”

— Arthur Miller

65. “Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

67. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

70. “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.”

— Arthur Miller

71. “Willy Loman: I don’t want change, I want Swiss cheese!”

— Arthur Miller

72. “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

73. “What work you do! It’s strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!”

— Arthur Miller

74. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop. Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it any more. I’m just what I am, that’s all.”

— Arthur Miller

81. “Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there’s nobody to live in it.”

— Arthur Miller

82. “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

83. “Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

87. “When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

89. “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

90. “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.”

— Arthur Miller

91. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

93. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

95. “THE PRICE grew out of a need to reconfirm the power of the past, the seedbed of current reality, and the way to possibly reaffirm cause and effect in an insane world.”

— Arthur Miller

96. “Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it’s a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still – that’s how you build a future.”

— Arthur Miller

97. “BIFF: I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I’m one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!”

— Arthur Miller

98. “Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”

— Arthur Miller

99. “John – tell me, are we lost?”

— Arthur Miller

100. “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