most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

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

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

The thing about stereotyping is it's usually just throwing rocks into a crowd hoping to hit somebody who deserves it.

You don't love someone because it's the logical thing to do.

The sense of national emergency engendered by war transforms the destruction of dissident opinion into patriotism.

The test audience holds a great deal of power in the process of filmmaking in the United States.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Politics is about the control of a limited number of resources by a limited number of people who think that number is too many

No work, as long as it is decent, can ever disgrace anybody.

Wherever arms flow, violence follows. Bullets replace ballots as the solution to political disputes.

The road is hard, and you have to get accustomed to it.

Law is experience developed by reason and applied continually to further experience.