Top 90 Lillian Hellman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People change and forget to tell each other.”

— Lillian Hellman

2. “It’s a sad day when you find out that it’s not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.”

— Lillian Hellman

3. “A room of one’s own isn’t nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one’s own.”

— Lillian Hellman

4. “Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation.”

— Lillian Hellman

5. “Lonely. I always thought loneliness meant alone, without people. It means something else.”

— Lillian Hellman

6. “It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.”

— Lillian Hellman

7. “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.”

— Lillian Hellman

8. “Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.”

— Lillian Hellman

9. “Like all former thinkers, I’m writing a book.”

— Lillian Hellman

10. “Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.”

— Lillian Hellman

11. “Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it.”

— Lillian Hellman

12. “For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.”

— Lillian Hellman

13. “I’m too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.”

— Lillian Hellman

14. “You can’t recover from what you do not understand.”

— Lillian Hellman

15. “Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”

— Lillian Hellman

16. “Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.”

— Lillian Hellman

17. “Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.”

— Lillian Hellman

18. “If you are willing to take the punishment, you’re halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.”

— Lillian Hellman

19. “Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.”

— Lillian Hellman

20. “The happy problem of our time – longer life.”

— Lillian Hellman

21. “No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It’s like arguing about earthquakes.”

— Lillian Hellman

22. “We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.”

— Lillian Hellman

23. “Callous greed grows pious very fast.”

— Lillian Hellman

24. “Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.”

— Lillian Hellman

25. “Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it’s a stinking way to create.”

— Lillian Hellman

26. “Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?”

— Lillian Hellman

27. “History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don’t start the earthquakes and don’t stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.”

— Lillian Hellman

28. “Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.”

— Lillian Hellman

29. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

— Lillian Hellman

30. “If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.”

— Lillian Hellman

31. “The writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.”

— Lillian Hellman

32. “We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that’s all we can promise in truth.”

— Lillian Hellman

33. “It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.”

— Lillian Hellman

34. “My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.”

— Lillian Hellman

35. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.”

— Lillian Hellman

36. “Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”

— Lillian Hellman

37. “Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?”

— Lillian Hellman

38. “Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.”

— Lillian Hellman

39. “Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.”

— Lillian Hellman

40. “I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one’s own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.”

— Lillian Hellman

41. “What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.”

— Lillian Hellman

42. “A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.”

— Lillian Hellman

43. “Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking...”

— Lillian Hellman

44. “You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.”

— Lillian Hellman

45. “God forgives those who invent what they need.”

— Lillian Hellman

46. “You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they’re not.”

— Lillian Hellman

47. “Fear comes with middle age.”

— Lillian Hellman

48. “I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”

— Lillian Hellman

49. “It doesn’t pay well to fight for what we believe in.”

— Lillian Hellman

50. “One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.”

— Lillian Hellman