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To Blame The Poor For Subsisting On Welfare Has No Justice Unless We Are Also Willing To Judge Every Rich Member Of Society By How Productive He Or She Is. Taken Individual By Individual, It Is Likely That There's More Idleness And Abuse Of Government Favors Among The Economically Privileged Than Among The Ranks Of The Disadvantaged.

-Norman Mailer

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To Blame The Poor

Norman Mailer

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To Blame The Poor For Subsisting On Welfare Has No Justice Unless We Are Also Willing To Judge Every Rich Member Of Society By How Productive He Or She Is. Taken Individual By Individual, It Is Likely That There's More Idleness And Abuse Of Government Favors Among The Economically Privileged Than Among The Ranks Of The Disadvantaged.

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Even An Evil Man Can Have Principleshe Can Be True To His Own Evil, Which Is Not Always So Easy.

I Do Believe That America's Deepest Political Sickness Is That It Is A Self-righteous Nation.

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.

Great Sex Is Apocalyptic. There Is No Such Thing As Great Sex Unless You Have An Apocalyptic Moment.

I Really Am A Pessimist. I've Always Felt That Fascism Is A More Natural Governmental Condition Than Democracy. Democracy Is A Grace. It's Something Essentially Splendid Because It's Not At All Routine Or Automatic. Fascism Goes Back To Our Infancy And Childhood, Where We Were Always Told How To Live. We Were Told, Yes, You May Do This; No, You May Not Do That. So The Secret Of Fascism Is That It Has This Appeal To People Whose Later Lives Are Not Satisfactory.

Existentialism Is The Kind Of Philosophy That Makes For Legendary Children.

I Take It For Granted That There's A Side Of Me That Loves Public Action, And There's Another Side Of Me That Really Wants To Be Alone And Work And Write. And I've Learned To Alternate The Two As Matters Develop.

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.

Three Miles Long And Two Streets Wide, The Town Curls Around The Bay ... A Gaudy Run With Mediterranean Splashes Of Color, Crowded Steep-pitched Roofs, Fishing Piers And Fishing Boats Whose Stench Of Mackerel And Gasoline Is As Aphrodisiac To The Sensuous Nose As The Clean Bar-whisky Smell Of A Nightclub Where Call Girls Congregate.

It's Very Bad To Write A Novel By Act Of Will. I Can Do A Book Of Nonfiction Work That Way - Just Sign The Contract And Do The Book Because, Provided The Topic Has Some Meaning For Me, I Know I Can Do It. But A Novel Is Different. A Novel Is More Like Falling In Love. You Don't Say, 'i'm Going To Fall In Love Next Tuesday, I'm Going To Begin My Novel.' The Novel Has To Come To You. It Has To Feel Just Like Love.

Falling In Love

We Didn't Win The Cold War, We Were Just A Big Bank That Bankrupted A Smaller Bank Because We Had An Arms Race That Wiped The Russians Out.

Writing For A Newspaper Is Like Running A Revolutionary War. You Go To Battle Not When You Are Ready, But When Action Offers Itself.

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.

There's A Subterranean Impetus Towards Pornography So Powerful That Half The Business World Is Juiced By The Sort Of Half Sex That One Finds In Advertisements.

The Difference Between Writing A Book And Being On Television Is The Difference Between Conceiving A Child And Having A Baby Made In A Test Tube.

I'm Hostile To Men, I'm Hostile To Women, I'm Hostile To Cats, To Poor Cockroaches, I'm Afraid Of Horses.

Los Angeles Is A Constellation Of Plastic.

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