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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
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Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Totalitarian
Nightmare
Worse
Gets
Democracy
Ends
Every

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Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
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Conservatives are people who look at a tree and feel instinctively that it is more beautiful than anything they can name. But when it comes to defending that tree against a highway, they will go for the highway.
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I usually need a can of beer to prime me.
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Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
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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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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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I've made an ass of myself so many times I often wonder if I am one.
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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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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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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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I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
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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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Part of the oncoming demise (of New York during its terrible fiscal crisis) is that none of us can simply believe it. We were always the best and the strongest of cities, and our people were vital to the teeth. Knock them down eight times and they would get up with that look in the eye which suggests the fight has barely begun.
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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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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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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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.
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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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