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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
Gets
Democracy
Ends
Every
Totalitarian
Nightmare
Worse

More quotes by Norman Mailer

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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
Norman Mailer
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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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You have the right to speak your mind.
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Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.
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Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Norman Mailer
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Murder offers the promise of vast relief. It is never unsexual.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.
Norman Mailer
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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The contradictory remarks of politicians are forgotten the more asinine predictions of pundits are buried with mercy.
Norman Mailer
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The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
Norman Mailer
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Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally.
Norman Mailer
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Tough guys don't dance. You had better believe it.
Norman Mailer
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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.
Norman Mailer
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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
Norman Mailer
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
Norman Mailer
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman Mailer
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
Norman Mailer
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Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Norman Mailer
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One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.
Norman Mailer