Lillian Hellman Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.

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

Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.

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

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?

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.

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.

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

Fear comes with middle age.

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

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

Everybody's got a habit.

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

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

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

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.