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“True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”
― Fay Weldon

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”
― Fay Weldon

“I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.”
― Fay Weldon, Chalcot Crescent

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.”
― Fay Weldon, Angel, all innocence, and other stories

“Because lurking somewhere beneath the surface of your brain is a vision of loneliness, and it will be a terrible moment when it breaks through, and you realise that your future is not a green pastures, but the knackers yard. We are all separate people, and we are all alone. It is a ridiculous thing to say that no man is an island. We are all islands. You can die, and Gerry won't. Gerry can die, and you won't. Our lives just go on, separate as they have always been.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

“Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman within, and there the she devil is.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
― Milan Kundera

“There is no perfection only life”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”
― Norman Mailer

“You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.”
― Norman Mailer

“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”
― Norman Mailer

“You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.”
― Norman Mailer

“Every moment of one’s existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”
― Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself

“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.”
― Norman Mailer

“I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.”
― Norman Mailer, On God: An Uncommon Conversation

“No heart is so hard as the timid heart.”
― Norman Mailer, The Gospel According to the Son

“On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty problems is much in doubt as far as I’m concerned. Liberalism depends all too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover, liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since I happen to be—I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects—but I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal’s mind is blown. He is consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end of real conversation.”
― Norman Mailer

“Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

“Metaphor reveals a writer’s true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.”
― Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

“What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”
― Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest

“Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.”
― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History

“A cop is a human creature born stupid and raised in stupidity.”
― Norman Mailer, Tough Guys Don't Dance

“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person. Everything that happens to one, happens to the other. If one gets married, the other is along for the ride. Otherwise, they are different. They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.�� She stopped for a nearer example. “Or optimism and pessimism.”
― Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost