David Mamet Quotes

Here is a parallel to the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis: In the 1930s, Churchill was out of power, out of office, demeaned as a warmonger, a fool, an unstable has-been, a lunatic, and so on. The interwar British press and the oligarchy were largely in favor of appeasement, and their influence spread to a populace legitimately unwilling to engage in another war. The British air force was flying World War I planes, the army was minuscule, and many members of the nobility (and monarchy) were actively pro-Fascist. Hitler saw that Churchill was unafraid, and it was he to whom the Brits in extremity would have to appeal. And Hitler was afraid of Churchill, because Churchill was unfazed by rhetoric, or chicanery, or threats. We cannot hate something unless we fear it. The Left’s loathing of President Trump was, finally, terror of one who was not afraid of them. * Predecessors include the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and Wilson’s Alien Enemy Proclamations of World War I, the public support of the latter demonstrated not only through applauding the deportation of German American citizens but through the shooting of dachshunds.

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.

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

The power of the dramatist, and of the political flack therefore, resides in the ability to state the problem.

Good luck will be the residue of good design.

in this great land, found his crouched, finger-pointing yentism merely the performance of a deeper truth and moral imperative, reducible to “stop working, tax the productive until they stop working, and let the country go to hell.

We were taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group — irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty — we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.

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.

We're basically nuts. Human beings, we're basically insane.

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute.

"The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest — these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. [From the chapter "The Script."]"

When all politicians are agreed, someone is getting bought off, for how can the interests of their various constituencies be identical? Only if that identity is the love of money and power.

written without hatred. They are not exploitative attempts to sell soap powder or political candidates; they are parables about the human condition, which, without connection to the divine, is always sin. With thanks to Billy Graham.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long survive. (A. Lincoln.) But we are not met upon a battlefield of that war. The battlefield for the culture is, of course,