Recessional Quotes

“Art has no chance of making the world "more just" than politics has of making it more beautiful.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“Over the last decade “shareholder” has been replaced by “stakeholder.”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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“An Evangelical who thinks the world is ending is called a religious fanatic; a liberal who thinks so is called an environmentalist.”—Dennis Prager * Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“Justice is the application of previously decided and accepted norms of conduct and the rules for their examination and dispute.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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. On accession to power, the first become apparatchiks, thrilled with their ability to control events. This brief phase culminates in their murder by their former partners. The ideologues, in their brief illusion of authority, are happy to invent new names for themselves (Citizen, Comrade) and for every other thing under the sun (his-her-we-they-them); they are let free to run through the big-box store of culture effacing and changing the labels, that is, controlling speech. The penalty for opposition, as we see, appears almost on the instant. First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, and dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent. Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure and the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide and must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting. After the inevitable Night of the Long Knives, the threat of blacklisting is upgraded to the certainty of imprisonment or death.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“Here is a parallel to the Left’s anti-Trump psychosis: In the 1930s, Churchill was out of power, out of office, demeaned as a warmonger, a fool, an unstable has-been, a lunatic, and so on. The interwar British press and the oligarchy were largely in favor of appeasement, and their influence spread to a populace legitimately unwilling to engage in another war. The British air force was flying World War I planes, the army was minuscule, and many members of the nobility (and monarchy) were actively pro-Fascist. Hitler saw that Churchill was unafraid, and it was he to whom the Brits in extremity would have to appeal. And Hitler was afraid of Churchill, because Churchill was unfazed by rhetoric, or chicanery, or threats. We cannot hate something unless we fear it. The Left’s loathing of President Trump was, finally, terror of one who was not afraid of them. * Predecessors include the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and Wilson’s Alien Enemy Proclamations of World War I, the public support of the latter demonstrated not only through applauding the deportation of German American citizens but through the shooting of dachshunds.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” The New England Journal of Medicine, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the COVID-19 Era,” May 21, 2020. * It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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,”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“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.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

“My current fantasy is to demand being referred to as, in both the first and the third persons, His Majesty–Your Majesty. Asked for further information, I could display the cold impenetrability of royalty and explain that I am a direct descendant of King David (who knows?), and the gophers around the table could, their choice, scream bullshit or go along with the gag. My daughter Clara says, “Dad, this is you at a business meeting: “Person A: ‘It’s an honor to meet you.’ “Me: ‘Then why don’t you go fuck yourself.”
― David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch