The Crucible Quotes

Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.

Oh,Elizabeth, your justice would freeze beer.

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you comin' through the door.

He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him!

Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked.

Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...

it's the proper morning to fly into Hell.

I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!

What work you do! It's strange work for a Christian girl to hang old women!

A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud – God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!

Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

I made a gift for you, Good Proctor. I had to sit long hours in a chair, and passed the time with sewing." - Mary Warren

Man, remember, until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.

Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!

Some dream I had must have mistaken you for God that day.

John Proctor’s flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America’s is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.

I am sick of meetings; cannot the man turn his head without he have a meeting?

What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants, and who is better than the minister." - Rev. John Hale

When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied some day.

John – tell me, are we lost?