David Mamet Quotes

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.

My current fantasy is to demand being referred to as, in both the first and the third persons, His Majesty–Your Majesty. Asked for further information, I could display the cold impenetrability of royalty and explain that I am a direct descendant of King David (who knows?), and the gophers around the table could, their choice, scream bullshit or go along with the gag. My daughter Clara says, “Dad, this is you at a business meeting: “Person A: ‘It’s an honor to meet you.’ “Me: ‘Then why don’t you go fuck yourself.

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.

"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."

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

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.

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.

The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images — because that is the essential nature of the medium.

Elected federal officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. When they aren’t held strictly to that oath, we have that anarchy we see metastasizing around us.

Many of us, and most of us from time to time, try to escape a blunt fact which may not tally with our self-image. When we are depressed, we re-create the world around us to rationalize our mood. We are then likely to overlook or misinterpret happy circumstances.

True to our past, we live and work with an inherited, observed, and accepted vision of personal futility, and of the beauty of the world.

"Performance art" works, as it's the nature of human perception to order random images in favor of an overriding preconception. Another example of this is neurosis. Neurosis is the ordering of unrelated events or ideas or images in favor of an overriding preconception.
"I am," for example, "an unsightly person": that's the overriding preconception. then given any two unrelated events I can order them to make them mean that. "Oh, yes, I understand. This woman came out of the hall and did not seem to notice me and rushed into the elevator and quickly pushed the button and the elevator closed because I am an unattractive person."

God, we are told, always answers our prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

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.