Death of the Great Man Quotes

“The culture was ready to be dominated by a man with his mix of braggadocio, bullheadedness, celebrity, cruelty, prejudice, know-nothingness, and, yes, narcissism and sociopathy and paranoia. My husband glommed onto a ready host, to our society with all its flaws and weaknesses, and the glomming made him great.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“I use chaos as leverage. I have made chaos normal. Chaos engenders chaos. The chaos I reek now opens the door to the vast chaos to come. I revel in chaos.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“He could leave the land in ruins and remain beloved.

He had made history. He was the end of history.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Race and class divisions, power imbalances, anti-intellectualism, anti-democratic leanings, and widespread poverty—not to mention Ponzi schemes—once we saw them as glitches in a country built on high ideals.

The Great Man showed us otherwise. The flaws we had called incidental were underpinnings. They comprised a grand tradition, present always.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Lying was his brand. He was too bold to bother with accuracy and too visionary to be held accountable in small matters. Lies served as virtue signaling—the virtue of those who disdain experts, science, stability, and convention.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“We undervalue irrationality, I believe. It can protect us in hostile settings.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Today, citizens were at once less trusting and more credulous. Many had swallowed lies of vast proportion.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Global warming, police brutality, voter suppression, racism. In his hands, weighty considerations escaped the pull of gravity. Damn, what a show!”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Hitler killed many millions. What of a despot whose death toll numbers in the hundreds of thousands?

Miriam recited her litany, the one that linked the Great Man to deaths. Deportation of migrants, caging of children—for her, those outrages were the first among many. The news told of dead journalists, dead churchgoers and concertgoers, dead nurses, dead checkout clerks, deaths in prisons, deaths in classrooms, deaths on city streets, deaths from domestic abuse and botched abortions, deaths from health care denied, deaths from race hatred and homophobia, deaths from floods and fires and poisonings and pollution. The deaths of despair, the suicides and overdoses—how many of those could be laid at the Regime’s door?

And that was just at home. The Great Man embraced foreign tyrants, wars erupted, and innocence perished. The Great Man squelched resistance here, and artists and writers died in distant jails. The seas rose and coastal dwellers drowned on distant shores.

For the Regime, death was a matter of policy. Nina”s arbitocracy was, to Mimi, better understood as thanatocracy. The Regime was anti-life. The Regime was pro-death.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“Grandiose patients often imagine that we know more about them than we do.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“If you entrust a nation’s economy to an impulsive leader with no care for facts, disaster will follow.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man

“We have, all of us, less control over our emotional states than we imagine, and not much more over our moral sensibilities.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Death of the Great Man