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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Make
Functions
Men
Frightened
Army
Function
Contemptuous
Fear
Fitted
Best
Subordinates
Work
Ladder
Every
Ladders

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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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I am not here only so that the blind might see, but to teach those who thought they could see that they are blind
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.
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Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
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Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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I hate everything which is not in myself.
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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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A high church for the true mediocre.
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.
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There`s a tendency for Americans, particularly the simpler you are, the more you believe in the president as the kind of person to be.
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The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic's assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
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