Top 120 Mary McCarthy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In violence, we forget who we are.”

— Mary McCarthy

2. “The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.”

— Mary McCarthy

3. “The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night’s sleep.”

— Mary McCarthy

4. “You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.”

— Mary McCarthy

5. “Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils.”

— Mary McCarthy

6. “The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.”

— Mary McCarthy

7. “The happy ending is our national belief.”

— Mary McCarthy

8. “We are the hero of our own story.”

— Mary McCarthy

9. “Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.”

— Mary McCarthy

10. “In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.”

— Mary McCarthy

11. “How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin.”

— Mary McCarthy

12. “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

— Mary McCarthy

13. “Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture.”

— Mary McCarthy

14. “Any sizeable Portuguese town looks like a superstitious bride’s finery – something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”

— Mary McCarthy

15. “Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.”

— Mary McCarthy

16. “The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.”

— Mary McCarthy

17. “For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.”

— Mary McCarthy

18. “Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.”

— Mary McCarthy

19. “Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.”

— Mary McCarthy

20. “A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.”

— Mary McCarthy

21. “Feminism is ridiculous. Feminists are silly idealists who want to be on top. There is no real equality in sexual relationships – someone always wins.”

— Mary McCarthy

22. “Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.”

— Mary McCarthy

23. “As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are ‘finished,’ even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.”

— Mary McCarthy

24. “What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?”

— Mary McCarthy

25. “Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.”

— Mary McCarthy

26. “Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.””

— Mary McCarthy

27. “In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the “knowledge,” seems sufficiently final.”

— Mary McCarthy

28. “Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk’s confession, an atheist’s repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.”

— Mary McCarthy

29. “Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.”

— Mary McCarthy

30. “There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”

— Mary McCarthy

31. “Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.”

— Mary McCarthy

32. “Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.”

— Mary McCarthy

33. “Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.”

— Mary McCarthy

34. “Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.”

— Mary McCarthy

35. “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.”

— Mary McCarthy

36. “The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.”

— Mary McCarthy

37. “The horror of Gandhi’s murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.”

— Mary McCarthy

38. “The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.”

— Mary McCarthy

39. “An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.”

— Mary McCarthy

40. “I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sides. On that occasion, as generally in the future, I compromised.”

— Mary McCarthy

41. “She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains.”

— Mary McCarthy

42. “The famous Florentine elegance, which attracts tourists to the shops on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, is characterized by austerity of line, simplicity, economy of effect.”

— Mary McCarthy

43. “Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a ‘work’ of man.”

— Mary McCarthy

44. “The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.”

— Mary McCarthy

45. “If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.”

— Mary McCarthy

46. “I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.”

— Mary McCarthy

47. “From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people...”

— Mary McCarthy

48. “The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.”

— Mary McCarthy

49. “Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.”

— Mary McCarthy

50. “I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.”

— Mary McCarthy