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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.

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
Worse
Gets
Democracy
Ends
Every
Totalitarian
Nightmare

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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
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I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.
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I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.
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Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
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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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I respect most boxers because they're violent people who learned to discipline themselves ... a good boxer is an artist ... Boxing is existential - some fights are better than others.
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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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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
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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 world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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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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No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
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Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
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