Quotes from David Mamet

CHARLES: I believe that any professional bears the shame of the questionable worth of his ministrations. I know of my racket what you know of yours: that, for the most part, we are paid for the ability to keep a straight face. While accomplishing little or nothing.

The Right has been hamstrung in resistance by adherence to law; for, to a conservative, what greater crime than adopting terror (the rejection of law) to preserve law? (Compare this from the Vietnam War: "We destroyed the village in order to save

When all politicians are agreed, someone is getting bought off, for how can the interests of their various constituencies be identical? Only if that identity is the love of money and power.

Elected federal officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. When they aren't held strictly to that oath, we have that anarchy we see metastasizing around us.

Just so with the movie, which is why bad filmmaking can succeed. It is our nature to want to make sense of these events—we can't help it. The human mind would make sense of them even if they were a random juxtaposition.

The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images—because that is the essential nature of the medium.

written without hatred. They are not exploitative attempts to sell soap powder or political candidates; they are parables about the human condition, which, without connection to the divine, is always sin. With thanks to Billy Graham.

I have sworn off the news because there is nothing new, and reiteration of the well-known and unfortunate serves no purpose other than as the bad narcotic of despair.

After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.

Over the last decade "shareholder" has been replaced by "stakeholder." I will remind my readers that a stakeholder is an onlooker to a gambling event. The contenders in the wager trust the stakeholder to hold their respective bets (the stakes) and at the contest's conclusion to award them to the winner. The stakeholder is one who, by definition, can have neither interest nor profit in the outcome. I believe no further comment is required.

Art has no chance of making the world more just than politics has of making it more beautiful.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

in this great land, found his crouched, finger-pointing yentism merely the performance of a deeper truth and moral imperative, reducible to "stop working, tax the productive until they stop working, and let the country go to hell.

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute.

We're basically nuts. Human beings, we're basically insane.

Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies.

The power of the dramatist, and of the political flack therefore, resides in the ability to state the problem.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long survive. (A. Lincoln.) But we are not met upon a battlefield of that war. The battlefield for the culture is, of course

Good luck will be the residue of good design.

The priests of our new idolatry are the politicians and their nongovernmental like who have discovered the old secret of power gained through fear of the mob.

The abandonment of the Minneapolis police station marked the beginning of the mature phase of an insurrection. As the anarchists solidify their power, it will be remembered as the Fort Sumter of the Revolution. The liberals who bowed them into power will then, sooner or later, be put against the wall. History records nothing to the contrary.

And perhaps the sun, in search of novelty, will rise in the west.

Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute. It is as imperfect as any other institution. But a dispassionate, considerate, supportable, and moral resolution of differences is the goal toward which it aspires.

I'm not an ascetic.