David Mamet Quotes

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the COVID-19 Era,” May 21, 2020. * It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.

I find out whose fuckin' cousin you are, I'm gonna go to him and figure out a way to have your ass, FUCK YOU!

Well, to the law, you’re an accessory. Before the fact.

Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both.

JOHN: You said “Good day.” I think that it is a nice day today.

CAROL: Is it?

JOHN: Yes, I think it is.

CAROL: And why is that important?

JOHN: Because it is the essence of all human communication. I say something
conventional, you respond, and the information we exchange is not about the
“weather,” but that we both agree to converse. In effect, we agree that we are both
human.

The abandonment of the Minneapolis police station marked the beginning of the mature phase of an insurrection. As the anarchists solidify their power, it will be remembered as the Fort Sumter of the Revolution. The liberals who bowed them into power will then, sooner or later, be put against the wall. History records nothing to the contrary.

The priests of our new idolatry are the politicians and their nongovernmental like who have discovered the old secret of power gained through fear of the mob.

Anybody that talks to this asshole is a fuckin' asshole.

"Just so with the movie, which is why bad filmmaking can "succeed." It is our nature to want to make sense of these events — we can't help it. The human mind would make sense of them even if they were a random juxtaposition."

The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can’t like it.

After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute. It is as imperfect as any other institution. But a dispassionate, considerate, supportable, and moral resolution of differences is the goal toward which it aspires.

The leaf of the camomile, parboiled in water, conduces to calm. And yet I do not worship it.

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.

CHARLES: I believe that any professional bears the shame of the questionable worth of his ministrations. I know of my racket what you know of yours: that, for the most part, we are paid for the ability to keep a straight face. While accomplishing little or nothing.