Jessica Mitford famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Change #Heartless #World
Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Running #Mean #America
The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Character #Understanding #May
Objectivity? I always have an objective.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Objectivity
Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Summer #Growing Up #Spring
Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Art #People #Brain
A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Book #Reading #Years
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Hands #Funeral #Victory
Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Beautiful #Memories #Order
Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Ambition #Chicago #Lexicographer
the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about. You may not be able to change the world but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Writing #Trying #World
[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Exercise #Simple #Appreciate
the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Expression #Unjust #Injustice
Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?
-- Jessica Mitford

#Roles #Prison #Paradox
Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Wall #Would Be #Prison
Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Enemy #Important #Passing
lifelong enemies are, I think, as hard to make and as important to one's well-being as lifelong friends.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Thinking #Enemy #Important
Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening ...
-- Jessica Mitford

#Children #Knowing #Interesting
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When "Somebody Up There" - a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator - so decrees.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Dictator #Pope #Crime
Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'
-- Jessica Mitford

#Running #America #People
I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Sister In Law #Want #My Sister
Objectivity? I've always had an objective.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Objectivity
Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Dying #Macabre #Gracious
Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Funeral
One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn't achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Jobs #Thinking #Circles
I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused by a natural urge in men to fight, that ownership of land and factories is not necessarily the natural reward of greater wisdom and energy.
-- Jessica Mitford

#War #Fighting #Men
It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Pain #Reassuring #Childbirth
In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor.
-- Jessica Mitford

#Fashion #Media #Class

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