Jessica Mitford

I discovered that Human Nature was not, as I had always supposed, a fixed and unalterable entity, that wars are not caused…

— Jessica Mitford

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor…

— Jessica Mitford

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

— Jessica Mitford

Picking other people's brains is an art worth cultivating.

— Jessica Mitford

A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that…

— Jessica Mitford

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an…

— Jessica Mitford

Now there is a society where the funeral industry got completely out of control.

— Jessica Mitford

Objectivity? I've always had an objective.

— Jessica Mitford

Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the…

— Jessica Mitford

Objectivity? I always have an objective.

— Jessica Mitford

the whole point of muck-raking, apart from all the jokes, is to try to do something about what you've been writing about.…

— Jessica Mitford

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's…

— Jessica Mitford

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

— Jessica Mitford

Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don't 'stand for election', they 'run for office.'

— Jessica Mitford

Prison walls are meant not only to keep convicts in, but to keep the would-be investigator out.

— Jessica Mitford

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.

— Jessica Mitford

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

— Jessica Mitford

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

— Jessica Mitford

Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into…

— Jessica Mitford

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were…

— Jessica Mitford

Enemies are, to me, as important as friends in my life, and when they die I mourn their passing.

— Jessica Mitford

The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the…

— Jessica Mitford

One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one's life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine,…

— Jessica Mitford

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not…

— Jessica Mitford

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

— Jessica Mitford