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.
More Quotes from Mary McCarthy:
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
The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is ... that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable ... the food we eat, the cramped apartments ... the crowded subways.... American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault of the senses and the nerves it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.
Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
Mary McCarthy
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
Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the
Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
Mary McCarthy
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Based on Topics: Good & Evil Quotes, Vice & Virtue QuotesBased on Keywords: criminality, crucifixion
You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.
Harvey Korman
I was put off by people at school - my cabbage wasn't as good as other people's, you know, so that put me off.
Roger McGough
Mere heathen morality, and not Jesus Christ, is preached in most of our churches.
George Whitefield