Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
Mary McCarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy

Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
Mary McCarthy

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
Mary McCarthy

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.
Mary McCarthy

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 you really must make the self.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

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

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


In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.
Mary McCarthy

In violence, we forget who we are.
Mary McCarthy

Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.
Mary McCarthy

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Mary McCarthy

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.
Mary McCarthy