I keep my family out of my public life because it can be an awful nuisance to them. What's my mother going to tell strangers anyway? That I was a cute baby and that she's terribly proud of me? Nuts. Who cares?
Montgomery CliftRead
I don't want to be labeled as either a pansy or a heterosexual. Labeling is so self-limiting. We are what we do - not what we say we are.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the limitations imposed by labels and encourages self-definition through actions rather than societal categories.
Montgomery Clift's quote challenges the conventional labeling that often defines human identity, suggesting that such tags can confine our true selves. Instead, it advocates for a perspective where one's essence is determined by actions and behaviors, rather than rigid classifications like 'pansy' or 'heterosexual,' promoting a more authentic and liberated understanding of identity.
Themes
IdentityLabelsSelf-DefinitionAuthenticityActions
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about individuality, this quote could emphasize the importance of self-identity.
More from Montgomery Clift
All quotes βNobody ever lies about being lonely.
Montgomery CliftRead
Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
Montgomery CliftRead
The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
Montgomery CliftRead
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Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, βWhat is God like?β and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
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Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
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All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.
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I glory in the distinguishing grace of God and will not, by the grace of God, step one inch from my principles or think of adhering to the present fashionable sort of religion.
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I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science... This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.
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All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.
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