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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

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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
State
Protector
Rather
Bound
Bounds
Freedom
Looked
Upon
Source
States
Becomes
Rights
Pleasure
Conditional

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If you want to be your own master ... always be surprised by evil never anticipate it.
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... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
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We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
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Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.
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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.
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it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
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Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
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What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
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For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.
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The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
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Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
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Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility.
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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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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.
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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.
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We are the hero of our own story.
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this is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her.
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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.
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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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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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