1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy Quotes
page 2

Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist.



✵ 21. June 1912 – 25. October 1989  •  Other names Mary McCarthyová, Mary Therese McCarthy
Mary McCarthy photo
Mary McCarthy: 79 quotes6 likes

Mary McCarthy Quotes

“We are a nation of twenty million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.”

Mary McCarthy

"America the Beautiful: The Humanist in the Bathtub", p. 13
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others it is too great a temptation — a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth.”

Mary McCarthy book Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

"To the Reader"
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

“The Venetians invented the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, anonymous denunciations (the Bocca del Leone), the gambling casino, and the Ghetto.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 7

“The Florentines, who were incapable of ruling themselves, produced a great theorist of government: Machiavelli. The Venetians had no theorists and evolved a model Republic.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 6

“Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

“The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous — poets and honeymooners.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: Venice Observed (1956), Ch. 1

“This refusal to listen was a form of stupidity that Martha especially abhorred, and she considered Miles well punished for it. If he had ever taken seriously her passionate desire to leave him, she might not (she now believed) have been driven in practice to show him how little indeed he knew. To pay attention, for Martha, was the prime human virtue; without it, there could be no dignity and no reciprocity.”

Mary McCarthy book A Charmed Life

Source: A Charmed Life (1955), Ch. 5, p. 594

“Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself.”

Mary McCarthy book A Charmed Life

Warren in Ch. 2, pp. 535–536
A Charmed Life (1955)

“For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.”

Mary McCarthy book The Groves of Academe

Source: The Groves of Academe (1952), Ch. VI, p. 383

“The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.”

Mary McCarthy book The Oasis

Source: The Oasis (1949), p. 253

“If only one could … But it required strength. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.”

Mary McCarthy

The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
First published in Harper's Bazaar (April 1942)
Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 6 "Ghostly Father, I Confess", p. 184.

“He had the true American taste for argument, argument as distinguished from conversation on the one hand and from oratory on the other. The long-drawn-out, meandering debate was, perhaps, the only art form he understood or relished, and this was natural since the argument is in a sense our only indigenous folk-art, and it is not the poet but the silver-tongued lawyer who is our real national bard.”

Mary McCarthy

Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 5 "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man", p. 141

“She could not bear to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said. This was true, and yet she knew that being a potential divorcee was deeply pleasurable in somewhat the same way that being an engaged girl had been.”

Mary McCarthy

First published in The Southern Review (Spring 1939)
Source: The Company She Keeps (1942), Ch. 1 "Cruel and Barbarous Treatment", p. 5, first lines of novel.

“Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.”

Mary McCarthy book The Oasis

Source: The Oasis (1949), p. 286