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The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.

Mary McCarthy

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Mary McCarthy
Age: 77 †
Born: 1912
Born: June 21
Died: 1989
Died: October 25
Author
Autobiographer
Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Mary Therese McCarthy
Men
Conscience
Platitude
Concern
Macbeth
Sleep
Platitudes
Idea
Concerns
Night
Throughout
Ideas
Selfish
Play
Main
Good
False

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Life for the European is a career for the American it is a hazard.
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Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers suspicion is reserved for friends.
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All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.
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There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
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The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
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Morality did not keep well it required stable conditions it was costly it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.
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In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the knowledge, seems sufficiently final.
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Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
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For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
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The dictator is also the scapegoat in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance.
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From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people.
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Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.
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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.
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In violence, we forget who we are
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For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.
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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.
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