Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

103. “When a deposit bottle is broken, you don’t get your nickel back.”

— Arthur Miller

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

107. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

— Arthur Miller

119. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

121. “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

122. “When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”

— Arthur Miller

123. “There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.”

— Arthur Miller

124. “You specialize in something until one day it is specializing in you.”

— Arthur Miller

125. “PARRIS: I want a mark of confidence, is all! I am your third preacher in seven years. I do not wish to be put out like the cat whenever some majority feels the whim.”

— Arthur Miller

126. “Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.”

— Arthur Miller

127. “Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.”

— Arthur Miller

128. “We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.”

— Arthur Miller

129. “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

130. “What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants...”

— Arthur Miller

131. “He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished.”

— Arthur Miller

132. “I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw – the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?”

— Arthur Miller

133. “I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.”

— Arthur Miller

134. “The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order – for meaning.”

— Arthur Miller

135. “Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.”

— Arthur Miller

136. “A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

138. “When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.”

— Arthur Miller

139. “When the law is wrong it’s because it’s unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now.”

— Arthur Miller

140. “Controlled hysteria is what’s required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It’s agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.”

— Arthur Miller

141. “I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing.” – Mary Warren.”

— Arthur Miller

142. “He’s just a big stupid man to you, but I tell you there’s more good in him than in may other people.”

— Arthur Miller

143. “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

— Arthur Miller

144. “I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know-what I’m supposed to want.”

— Arthur Miller

145. “Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!”

— Arthur Miller

146. “It is as though they stood in a spinning world.”

— Arthur Miller

147. “Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?”

— Arthur Miller

148. “Be liked and you will never want.”

— Arthur Miller

149. “The word “now” is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.”

— Arthur Miller

150. “Suicide kills two people.”

— Arthur Miller