Playwrights From The United States

"Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it."

"You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom."

"One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy. (Page 5)"

"Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date."

"If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises...."

"It was all about borders. And Arnold was on the wrong side of them. He’d end up spending the rest of his life in a 8’ x 10’ cell, another darling of the Left like Mumia Abu-Jamal or Lisl Auman, because he happened to be standing on one side of an arbitrary political boundary, a line as imaginary as the equator."

"If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty."

"While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support."

"I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover."

"Always warm up the audience with a joke....If you are not a particularly funny person, make sure that you inform them that it's a joke...."

"Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer."

"The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him."

"Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer."

"Much as constitutional guarantees of press freedom do little good for prospective publishers if they do not have access to paper or ink, the right to aid in dying is strikingly useless if nobody is willing to help."

"There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery."

"Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being."

"Much as we do not permit convicted pedophiles to teach kindergarten or convicted hijackers to board airplanes, common sense dictates that individuals who have been imprisoned for plotting violence against abortion clinics should never again be permitted anywhere near such facilities."

"I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square--but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber."

"Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing — and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life."

"I have vicarious morning sickness. Other people's babies make me nauseous."

"Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform."

"I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage."

"Most people are far more concerned that they can control their own bodies than they are about petitioning Congress."

"The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop."

"The cold, cruel reality is that with one current justice now approaching ninety, and four others over seventy, the day will inevitably arrive when a sitting justice lies in an intensive care unit, both unable to resign and unable to resume his or her duties."

"“For recent presidents, especially those still living, there is always the possibility, a rather strong one, that we will discover additional information that is presently known to physicians and presidents but not to the general public...Almost all of the modern presidents would have been rated higher and looked healthier on paper while in office than they do in retrospect with the benefit of information not released during their terms.”"

"In a word, the home is a little dull. When you have got a woman in a box, and you pay rent on the box, her relationship to you insensibly changes character. It loses the fine excitement of democracy. It ceases to be companionship, for companionship is only possible in a democracy. It is no longer a sharing of life together—it is a breaking of life apart. Half a life—cooking, clothes, and children; half a life—business, politics, and baseball. It doesn’t make much difference which is the poorer half. Either half, when it comes to life, is very near to none at all.Of course, this artificial distinction does not strictly obtain in any particular marriage. There is an attempt to break it down. It is an honourable attempt. But our civilization is nevertheless built on that distinction, In order to break down that distinction utterly, it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world. It is in the great world that a man finds his sweetheart, and in that narrow little box outside of the world that he loses her. When she has left that box and gone back into the great world, a citizen and a worker, then with surprise and delight he will discover her again, and never let her go."

"Byron’s whole contribution to literature is the inculcation of an amused and amusing cynicism in regard to Human Nature. But it is a broken-hearted cynicism. He mocks because he once believed. His cynicism is the souring of a youthful love of mankind. Byron’s youth had been nourished upon eighteenth-century Utopianism. He, too, once believed in man; and his cynic humor is the in which he disguises his indignation and chagrin at the betrayal of his hopes."

"One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Eastman, Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line...More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed (journalist), Art Young, and Charles Winter."

"Two editors of the Masses, Crystal Eastman's brother Max and Floyd Dell, used that journal for vigorous advocacy of feminist issues... The Masses was the only male-edited socialist journal that consistently affirmed the importance of equality as essential for the full development of the lives of both men and women. In a satiric piece, Floyd Dell took up the arguments of the antifeminists. "I thought, you see, that [women] were persons like myself. Well, they aren't. I know better now.""

"Neil Simon strikes me less as the new Moliere than as a rattier Rattigan."

"If you can go through life without ever experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet. And if you've gone through pain and think you know exactly why, you haven't examined all the options."

"Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage…Like two out of every ten couples."

"And so she lived ... hopefully ... ever after."

"Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money."

"You're welcome to take a bath. You look like the second week of the garbage strike."

"If I had to make one comparison, I'd say that when it's five below in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles, and when it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles; but there are 2,000,000 interesting people in New York–and only 78 in Los Angeles. There may be a hell of a lot more, but it's hard to find them."

"People with honorary awards are looked upon with disfavor. Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your brand-new Mercedes?"

"Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life."

"A writer without confidence is like a metaphor without something to compare itself to."

"You believe in freedom of speech for communists because what they say is true. You do not believe in freedom of speech for fascists because what they say is a lie."

"I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This committee is on trial here before the American people. Let us get that straight."

"'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there 's no place like home; A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere."

"An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain, Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again; The birds singing gayly, that came at my call, Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all."

"Do you believe that the dead can influence the living?... Could you conceive of a superhuman mentality influencing someone from the other side of death?... There is such a one.... Someone, something that reaches out from beyond the grave and fills me with horrible impulses."

"Possibly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your psychiatry, Mr. Garth."

"My mind is just as open as it ever was, professor. But it's a scientific mind, and there's no place in it for superstitions."

"You can't murder a man who's been dead for five centuries."

"The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."

"For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing."