Arthur Miller Quotes on Truth
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A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
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The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
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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.
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The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
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My argument with so much as psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call 'happiness.' There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.
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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.
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I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.
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The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone.
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We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment.
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A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.
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Danforth: Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free? Proctor: I mean to deny nothing! Danforth: Then explain to me, Mr. Proctor, why you will not let - Proctor: [With the cry of his whole soul] Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
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Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!