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Bureaucracy
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Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
-Mary McCarthy
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Culture
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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
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Curiosity
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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
-Mary McCarthy
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Friends
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...friendship...is essential to intellectuals. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.
-Mary McCarthy
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Liberty
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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
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Life
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We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
-Mary McCarthy
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Optimism
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The happy ending is our national belief.
-Mary McCarthy
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Politics
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In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
-Mary McCarthy
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Racism
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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 possibility.
-Mary McCarthy
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Religion
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To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
-Mary McCarthy
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Science
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In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.
-Mary McCarthy
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Speeches (oratory)
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Congress
-Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary, 1961
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Twentieth Century
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It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
-Mary McCarthy
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Violence
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In violence we forget who we are.
-Mary McCarthy
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Books by and about Mary McCarthy