Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Lillian Hellman (American Playwright)

Lillian Hellman (1907–84,) fully Lillian Florence Hellman, was an American playwright and left-wing activist. Her plays, such as The Children’s Hour and The Little Foxes, often echoed her socialist and feminist concerns. In a career spanning 50 years, she was one of the most persuasive playwrights in modern American theater.

Born into a Southern Jewish family in New Orleans, Hellman was educated at New York and Columbia universities. She worked for the New York Herald Tribune as a reviewer (1925–28) and MGM in Hollywood as a reader of plays (1927–32.)

Hellman lived with detective writer Dashiell Hammett for many years, who urged her writing. Her first stage success, The Children’s Hour (1934; filmed as These Three (1936,)) ran on Broadway for 691 performances. It was followed by Days to Come (1936) and The Little Foxes (1939.)

During World War II, Hellman wrote the anti-fascist plays Watch on the Rhine (1941; winner of the Critics Circle award) and The Searching Wind (1944.) As portrayed in her controversial memoir Scoundrel Time (1976,) Hellman was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s. Though an anti-communist by this period, she declined to give names or betray friends. She also coined the famous phrase, ‘I can’t cut my conscience to lit this year’s fashions.’

Hellman’s other plays include The Autumn Garden (1951) and Toys in the Attic (1960.) Her autobiographical works include An Unfinished Woman (1969,) Pentimento (1973,) and Maybe (1980.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Lillian Hellman

The past with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Reflection

What a luxury it is to spend time with old friends … talking, as old friends should talk, about nothing, about everything.
Lillian Hellman

Freedom costs you a great deal.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Freedom

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge’s chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Prejudice

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Reason, Instincts, Decisions

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Loneliness

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Guilt

Things start as hopes and end up as habits.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Habit

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Acceptance, Perfection, Writing

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Assurance, Acting As If, Confidence

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Blessings, Success & Failure, Bad Times

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals

You lose your manners when you’re poor.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: The Poor, Poverty

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Equality

People change and forget to tell each other.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Relationships

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Desires

Unjust. How many times I’ve used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don’t have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Self-Discovery

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Fame

They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Listening, Writing

It’s an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip.
Lillian Hellman
Topics: Gossip, Belief

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