David Mamet Quotes

The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.

The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children — to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation.

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. Page 28

The Right has been hamstrung in resistance by adherence to law; for, to a conservative, what greater crime than adopting terror (the rejection of law) to preserve law? (Compare this from the Vietnam War: “We destroyed the village in order to save

We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?

It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.

And perhaps the sun, in search of novelty, will rise in the west.

How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.

"Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

Flattery takes away the capacity of the listener to make a rational, unbiased opinion.

[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth. Lingk is at the booth next to him. Roma ,i>is talking to him.
* * *

Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank,/i> closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)

FAUSTUS. To have fooled the philosopher.
MAGUS. One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
FAUSTUS. One finds the same in mine.

But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change.

Always be closing.

Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies. On accession to power, the first become apparatchiks, thrilled with their ability to control events. This brief phase culminates in their murder by their former partners. The ideologues, in their brief illusion of authority, are happy to invent new names for themselves (Citizen, Comrade) and for every other thing under the sun (his-her-we-they-them); they are let free to run through the big-box store of culture effacing and changing the labels, that is, controlling speech. The penalty for opposition, as we see, appears almost on the instant. First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting. After the inevitable Night of the Long Knives, the threat of blacklisting is upgraded to the certainty of imprisonment or death.