Quote

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.

Mary McCarthy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Doe
Grammar
Wells
Mainly
Well
Nearly
Matter
Level
Much
Poverty
Levels
Illiteracy
Rich
Alarm
Poor
Alarms

More quotes by Mary McCarthy

Image
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Mary McCarthy
Image
For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
Mary McCarthy
Image
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.
Mary McCarthy
Image
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
Mary McCarthy
Image
it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
Mary McCarthy
Image
If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Old money is fully as moronic as new money but it has inherited an appearance of cultivation.
Mary McCarthy
Image
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.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.
Mary McCarthy
Image
It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
Mary McCarthy
Image
I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.
Mary McCarthy
Image
We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
Mary McCarthy
Image
For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.
Mary McCarthy
Image
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Mary McCarthy
Image
The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.
Mary McCarthy