Quote

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
Men
Frightened
Army
Function
Contemptuous
Fear
Fitted
Best
Subordinates
Work
Ladder
Every
Ladders
Make
Functions

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
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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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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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Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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I can`t get excited about politics, but I love it as a game. Because what I love in politics - this is very selfish of me, but who cares - what I do love in politics is this ability it has to make you think in new ways.
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The essence of spirit ... was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?
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The Barry Goldwater movement excited the depths because the apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the empty promises of an empty liberal center.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
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The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.
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We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
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We love those who can lead us to a place we will never reach without them.
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