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We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

David Mamet

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David Mamet
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
Author
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
Thought
Media
Limit
Become
Liberty
Police
Live
Wonder
Calling
Viability
Call
Concern
Censoring
Nations
Limits
Oppressive
Freedom
Nation
Dissent
Times
Expression
Censorship
Process
Instead
Commercial

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The secret knowledge is there's nobody home but us chickens. The Constitution was written by a bunch of regular guys who tried to get together and thrash out a contract under which they could get together that would keep people together.
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I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.
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The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders the Arabs would like to kill them all.
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I'm entitled to my political opinions, and I get to vote because I'm an American.
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Film is a collaborative business: bend over.
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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
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Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.
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Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
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I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.
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For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.
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Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.
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A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
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We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
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A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.
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Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
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The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
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What we're trying to do is find two or more shots the juxtaposition of which will give us the idea.
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One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.
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The mind is a mill which can incessant turn, 'til its mere operation focus the stress inward and the stones grind themselves to dust.
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I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else.
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