They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
David MametRead
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that individuals are solely responsible for their own defense, a right protected by the Constitution.
David Mamet's quote underscores the belief that personal responsibility and self-defense are intrinsic rights of individuals enshrined in the Constitution. It suggests that while external support may exist, ultimately, it is the individual who is best suited to ensure their own safety and well-being, and this right is fundamentally protected by law.
In practice
In a legal debate about personal rights and self-defense laws.
They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.
You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
We can see the same spirit in everybody only when we know we are that spirit, Atman or Self. Only a person who has understood his own Self can see that Self in everybody.
Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.
You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.
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