Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a ''work'' of man.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

We are the hero of our own story.
- Mary McCarthy Quote

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
- Mary McCarthy Quote