A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
– Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
– Mary McCarthy
Congress - these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.
– Mary McCarthy
Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
– Mary McCarthy
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
– Mary McCarthy
Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
– Mary McCarthy
I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.
– Mary McCarthy
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
If someone tells you he is going to make a realistic decision, you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad.
– Mary McCarthy
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
– Mary McCarthy
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
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
– 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 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
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
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
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
– Mary McCarthy
We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
– Mary McCarthy
We are the hero of our own story.
– Mary McCarthy
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
– Mary McCarthy
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
– Mary McCarthy
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.