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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.

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
Guilt
Lambs
Innocent
Dictator
Pray
Masses
Hypocritically
Praying
Oppressed
Groaning
Mass
Tyranny
Scapegoat
Authority
Absolutes
Assumes
Also
Assuming
Deliverance
Absolute
Yoke

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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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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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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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most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know it made them feel ignorant.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that - how to express this - you really must make the self.
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The happy ending is our national belief.
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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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My occupational hazard is that I can't help plagiarizing from real life.
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If someone tells you he is going to make a 'realistic decision', you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.
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A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
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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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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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...the tourist Venice is Venice.
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America is indeed a revelation, though not quite the one that was planned. Given a clean slate, man, it was hoped, would write the future. Instead, he has written his past.
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An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
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Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
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