Miami and the Siege of Chicago Quotes

“Politics at national level can still be comprehended by politics-as-property provided one remembers that moral integrity (or the public impression of such) in a high politician is also property, since it brings power and/or emoluments to him. Indeed a very high politician—which is to say a statesman or leader—has no political substance unless he is the servant of ideological institutions or interests and the available moral passions of the electorate, so serving, he is the agent of the political power they bestow on him, which power is certainly a property. Being”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968

“(Observing the chaos during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago from his hotel room high above the fray) A great stillness rose up from the street through all the small noise of clubbing and cries, small sirens, sigh of loaded arrest vans as off they pulled, shouts of police as they wheeled in larger circles, the intersection clearing further, then further, a stillness rose through the steel and stone of the hotel, congregating in the shocked centers of every room where delegates and their wives and Press and campaign workers innocent until now of the intimate working of social force, looked down now into the murderous paradigm of Vietnam there beneath them at this huge intersection of this great city.”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

“Most politicians are pigs...It's a funny thing about pigs...They have an odd way of keeping warm in winter if they find themselves outside. You see, pigs don't know if they're cold, provided their nose is warm. So they stand around in a circle with their nose between the hind legs of the pig in front of them. Would you call that a curious relationship?...I would call that a Satanic relationship.”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

“It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968

“He was drinking and contemplating his fear. It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed”
― Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968