David Mamet Quotes
-
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
-
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
-
Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
-
American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.
-
There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.
-
The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.
-
In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.
-
I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.
-
When I started out I was a failed actor.
-
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
-
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
-
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
-
Cop couldn't find his fucking couch, the living room.
-
My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.
-
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
-
You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can't do one of those three things, you ain't going to get any money.
-
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
-
I won't ever do e-mail.
-
I've always been fascinated by the picaresque.
-
It's upsetting to be a man in our society.
-
In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.
-
I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
-
In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
-
I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer.