Lillian Hellman Quotes

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

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

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.

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

People change and forget to tell each other.

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.

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

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

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

The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.

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.

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.

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

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

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

You can't recover from what you do not understand.

It {France} may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.

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.

I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

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

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a game called getting through the day while you wait for the night.

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

You lose your manners when you're poor.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

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

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.

Maybe money is unreal for most of us, easier to give away than things we want.

How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

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.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn't disturb it.

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?

Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking.

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.

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

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

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