Top 250 Arthur Miller Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

107. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

127. “Without alienation, there can be no politics.”

— Arthur Miller

128. “MOTHER: What more can we be! CHRIS: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that’s why he died.”

— Arthur Miller

129. “Suicide kills two people.”

— Arthur Miller

130. “John Proctor: I will fall like an ocean on that court!”

— Arthur Miller

131. “He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”

— Arthur Miller

132. “Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.”

— Arthur Miller

133. “The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. 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

134. “The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...”

— Arthur Miller

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

— Arthur Miller

136. “Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.”

— Arthur Miller

137. “A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.”

— Arthur Miller

138. “But you didn’t rest your mind. your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.”

— Arthur Miller

139. “Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don’t lay on complications that aren’t necessary.”

— Arthur Miller

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140. “Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.”

— Arthur Miller

141. “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

— Arthur Miller

142. “The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding.”

— Arthur Miller

143. “When the guns roar, the arts die.”

— Arthur Miller

144. “You want to live? You better figure out your life.”

— Arthur Miller

145. “There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.”

— Arthur Miller

146. “Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn’t influenced is never of any use.”

— Arthur Miller

147. “If you analyse anything, you destroy it.”

— Arthur Miller

148. “PROCTOR – he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same! What others say and what i sign to is not the same!”

— Arthur Miller

149. “Gotta break your neck to see a star in this yard.”

— Arthur Miller

150. “One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.”

— Arthur Miller