Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cruel individuals often justify their behavior by claiming to be honest and direct.
This quote by Tennessee Williams highlights the hypocrisy in self-perception among cruel individuals, who tend to mask their malice with a facade of honesty. By portraying themselves as paragons of frankness, they deflect criticism and avoid recognition of their harmful actions, suggesting that one's self-identity can be distorted to justify unethical behavior.
Themes
CrueltyHonestyHypocrisySelf-PerceptionFrankness
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about honesty in relationships, this quote can be used to illustrate the idea that some people hide their true intentions under a guise of frankness.
More from Tennessee Williams
All quotes →Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Similar quotes
It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.
Rowan WilliamsRead
Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse
Sissela BokRead
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering
Friedrich NietzscheRead
You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
Diane AckermanRead
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
H. L. MenckenRead