Lillian Hellman: Believer

Lillian Hellman was American dramatist and screenwriter. Explore interesting quotes on believer.
Lillian Hellman: 40   quotes 1   like

“I do not believe in recovery. The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.”

Source: Scoundrel Time (1976), p. 150
Context: Sad is a fake word for me to be using, I am still angry that their reason for disagreeing with McCarthy was too often his crude methods.... Many of the anti-Communists were, of course, honest men. But none of them... has stepped forward to admit a mistake. It is not necessary in this country; they too know that we are a people who do not remember much. I have written here that I have recovered. I mean it only in a worldly sense because I do not believe in recovery. The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

“Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber can believe in an unprejudiced point of view”

"Love Letters, Some Not So Loving" (a review of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West by Gordon N. Ray), in The New York Times (13 October 1974) http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-ray.html; this has often been paraphrased as "Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view."
Context: Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a Judge's chamber can believe in an unprejudiced point of view but, simply in self-interest, the biographer must try for one, or make us believe he has, or tell us that he hasn't.