1963 interview, used in The Century of the Self (2002)
Context: My argument with so much of 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.
Arthur Miller: Man
Arthur Miller was playwright from the United States. Explore interesting quotes on man.“Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.”
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 2
Context: My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief — optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.
It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time — the heart and spirit of the average man.
“He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”
Charley
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Context: Nobody dast blame this man. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.
Collected Plays (1958) Introduction, Section 7
Context: By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
“You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit.”
Willy
Source: Death of a Salesman (1949)
“A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.”
Source: Death of a Salesman
The Crucible (1953)
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
“They don't need me in New York. I'm the New England man. I'm vital in New England.”
Willy Loman
Death of a Salesman (1949)
Lyman, Act 2
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)
Willy
Death of a Salesman (1949)
John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)
"It Could Happen Here - And Did," http://books.google.com/books?id=SxkSdaCoHL8C&pg=PA295&dq=%22arthur+miller%22+%22panic+button%22&ei=E4VoR9-SMI34iwHf9LFo&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=f0iKJxpOGjd5_Zs83QcNtAWLpH0 New York Times (30 April 1967); also in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1996)