"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."

Mccarthy, Mary on America
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"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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Goodness
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"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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Housework
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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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Liberty
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"We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story."

Mccarthy, Mary on Life and Living
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"The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a negative point of view, intolerable. What the foreigner finds most objectionable in American life is its lack of basic comfort. No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it."

Mccarthy, Mary on Materialism
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"The happy ending is our national belief."

Mccarthy, Mary on Optimism
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"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons."

Mccarthy, Mary on Politicians and Politics
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"In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?"

Mccarthy, Mary on Poverty and The Poor
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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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Race and Racism
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"In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality."

Mccarthy, Mary on Science and Scientists
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"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

Mccarthy, Mary on Bureaucracy
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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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Catholicism
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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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Twentieth Century
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"In violence we forget who we are."

Mccarthy, Mary on Violence
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"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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Work
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"The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to 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, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear."

Mccarthy, Mary on Congress
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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."

Mccarthy, Mary on Culture
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"Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted."

Mccarthy, Mary on Curiosity
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