Harsh Reality Movie Quotes Quotes for the Soul Quotes for Society MQP FAQ Don’t think that life is so neat. There are always things that take us by surprise. Audrey Gardiner in Four Minutes (2005)
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They say time is the fire in which we burn. Malcolm McDowell, Star Trek: Generations (1994) You think this machine’s your friend, but it’s not. Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail (1998) Conviction, it turns out, is a luxury of those on the sidelines. Ed Harris, A Beautiful Mind (2001) I haven’t met that many happy people in my life. How do they act? Meg Tilly, The Big Chill (1983) What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered? Bill Murray, Groundhog Day (1993) Everybody takes a beating sometimes. Ray Liotta, Goodfellas (1990) The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects (1995) The system perpetuates itself at the expense of the people. Ben Kingsley, Sneakers (1992) The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. Kevin Costner, JFK (1991) Money is one giant pain in the ass if you ask me. Martin Sheen, Wall Street (1987) How do you have patience for people who claim they love America but clearly can’t stand Americans? Annette Bening, The American President (1995) We’re going to seduce them with our square footage and our discounts and our deep armchairs and our cappuccino. They’re going to hate us at the beginning but we’ll get them in the end. Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail (1998) What if there were no tomorrow? Bill Murray, Groundhog Day (1993) We’re selling cosmetics, not curing cancer. Steve Martin, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) Don’t make people repeat themselves. It’s annoying. Harvey Pekar, American Splendor (2002) War is the biggest business in America. Kevin Costner, JFK (1991) The truth hurts... Oh, sure, maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with the seat missing, but it hurts. Leslie Neilsen, The Naked Gun 2-1/2 (1991) We all have our little secrets, don’t we? Robert Redford, Sneakers (1992) Have you ever heard of Rwanda? Tens of thousands of people killed before sundown. Nobody has killed people like that since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye...? Did you do an Amnesty International...Save The Whales, Greenpeace or something? No. Tom Cruise, Collateral (2004) Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Al Pacino, The Godfather (1972) You want to kill the good guy but not be the bad guy. Doesn’t work like that. You gotta wait, until the bad guy kills the good guy, then when you kill the bad guy, you’re the good guy. Hank Azaria, Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: Will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we’re gone and wonder who we were? Sean Bean, Troy (2004) You make your choices and you live with them. Bill Murray, Groundhog Day (1993) Sometimes we don’t do things we want to do so that others won’t know we want to do them. Bryce Dalas Howard, The Village (2004) Money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it. Ben Kingsley, Sneakers (1992) Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you’ll wake up and you’ll discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you. It never will and suddenly you are old. It didn’t happen. And it never will because you were never going to do it anyway. You push it into a memory then zone out in your Barcalounger being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Tom Cruise, Collateral (2004) The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Donald Sutherland, JFK (1991) Nothing grinds my gears worse than some chowderhead who doesn’t know when to keep his big trap shut. John Candy, Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) All lies, all evil deeds, they stink. You can cover ‘em up, but they don’t go away. Clive Owen, Inside Man (2006) We go through life, early life, preoccupied about ourselves, the world revolves around our butts and stuff. And as you mature, you expand into the rest of the world, and you become part of a world culture, and you soft of find out, the hard way even, that the world doesn’t revolve around your butt, and that unless you play team.... Frank Gehry, Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005) We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) To do something, anything, is hard. It’s much easier to blame your father, your mother, the environment, the government, a lack of money, but even if you find a place to assign the blame, it doesn’t make the problems go away. Antonio Banderas, Take the Lead (2006) Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labor-saving devices. But somehow he didn’t know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make his life easier, the more complicated he made it. ... And civilized man, who refused to adapt himself to his natural surroundings, now finds that he has to adapt and re-adapt himself every day and every hour of the day to his self-created environment. Paddy O’Byrne, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) The strangeness of this life cannot be measured. Kevin Costner, Dances With Wolves (1990) Why do we have an ecomony where the poor have to pay so the rich won’t lose money? Warren Beatty, Reds (1981) You men, you’re always choosin’ a gun over a remedy. Anjelica Huston, Seraphim Falls (2007) You can’t go around hurting people and then just say you’re sorry and it all gets washed away. Why would heaven want people like that? Christina Ricci, Black Snake Moan (2007) It’s a sorry state of affairs when you can’t find a role model to cast your vote for. Tim Robbins, Arlington (1999) You have a superior air about you. Who ever told you you were so special? Carrie-Anne Moss, Snow Cake (2006) Nobody said love’s perfect. John Candy, Splash (1984) In Italy for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. Orson Welles, The Third Man (1949) This road you’re on. You put yourself on this road. ... You chose this. Guy Pearce, First Snow (2007) There are secrets in every corner of this village. Do you not feel it? Do you not see it? Joaquin Phoenix, The Village (2004) The public has a very short memory. Martin Scorsese, Quiz Show (1994) Unlike the powerful, I was not so arrogant as to be sure that my actions were righteous. Certainty is the disease of kings. Sean Penn, The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) The problem is, most people want to be the same. They find it easier to simply ignore this fundamental aspect of the human condition. They’re so eager to be part of the group, that they’ll betray their own nature to get there. Liam Neeson, Kinsey (2004) Nobody would do anything, if they knew what they were in for. Carlos Riquelme, The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) You cannot find peace by avoiding life. Nicole Kidman, The Hours (2002) Whose life, if you look at it under a microscope, doesn’t have any flaws? Russell Crowe, The Insider (1999) What is the answer to ninety-nine out of a hundred questions? Money. Tom Cruise, Vanilla Sky (2001) You think you know who you are? You have no idea. Matt Dillon, Crash (2005) A man’s life is his own fault. Joseph Bologna, Fathers and Sons (2004) You don’t have to be poor to be a whore. Look around you. In the mansions, in the churches, in the universities. Everyone is corruptible. Steven Skybell, Cradle Will Rock (1999) The truth has its price. Ralph Fiennes, Quiz Show (1994) Greatness, it comes in many forms. Sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice, that’s the loneliest form. Jeff Bridges, The Contender (2000) We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. Sam Waterston, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988) Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Nicole Kidman, The Interpreter (2005) Presidents don’t have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it. Mos Def, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) Who are you to think that you can infect the whole world with your bad mood? Who are you to think you can do that? William Sanderson, Stanley’s Gig (2000) The loser wants everybody to be as unhappy as himself. After all, misery loves company. Joe Pantoliano, Second Best (2005) Just because people want to eat the burger doesn’t mean they want to meet the cow. Steve Buscemi, The Island (2005) Ignorance is not innocence. Ayad Akhtar, The War Within (2005) I’m talking about when you’re nearer the end of your life than the beginning. What do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I’m going to do this, become that? What future? No. What you think is: How will I be regarded in the end, after I’m gone? Christopher Plummer, The Insider (1999) A very good sign that you’re crazy is an inability to ask the question, “Am I crazy?” Anthony Hopkins, Proof (2004) There are no murders in Africa. Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization. Benefits we can afford so easily, because those lives were bought so cheaply. Danny Huston, The Constant Gardener (2005) How come we never know what we want? That happens to everyone, doesn’t it? No one knows what they want. Ron Eldard, Fathers and Sons (2004) When you look back, so much of life is wasted in loneliness. There’s not one of us that doesn’t need friends, companionship, attachments. Kirk Douglas, Lust for Life (1956) Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. Easy doesn’t enter into grownup life. Michael Caine, The Weather Man (2005) If there’s anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me, that man is full of bullsh#&. Peter Finch, Network (1976) Who decides what’s weeds? It’s a pretty nice plant. It’s got beautiful flowers and everything. But then somebody comes along, calls it a weed, and I got to pull it out. Doesn’t seem fair somehow. Padrig Owen Jones, Undertaking Betty (2004) That’s the beauty of argument, because if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong. Aaron Eckhart, Thank You For Smoking (2005) If you don’t vote, you don’t matter. Sean Penn, All the King’s Men (2006) We’re using our military to ensure the flow of oil, we’re using tax dollars to support the car companies in different ways, and we’re not using our tax money to do the things that we really need to do to prepare for the future. Wally E Rippel, Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well. Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) A man can get anything he wants, as long as he pays the price. Robert De Niro, The King of Comedy (1983) Big pharmaceuticals, they’re right up there with the arms dealers. Pete Posthelwaite, The Constant Gardener (2005) When the blind lead the blind, don’t they both fall in the ditch? Kirk Douglas, Lust for Life (1956) Man’s reach exceeds his imagination. Hugh Jackman, The Prestige (2006) Sometimes I wonder, will God ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other? Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond (2006) There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. ... We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies... The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. Ned Beatty, Network (1976) Man’s reach exceeds his imagination. Hugh Jackman, The Prestige (2006) One of the things you learn as you grow older is that life gets very complicated, weird actually. People aren’t exactly like they seem, nothing is. Life gets unbelievable. This is normal as you get older. Dustin Hoffman, Hero (1992) That which is yours will always return to you. That which you take, will always be taken from you. Wes Studi, Seraphim Falls (2007) You’re not God. You can’t see everything. You don’t decide what’s justice. Aaron Eckhart, Suspect Zero (2004) You know, we think we can wound this planet. We think we can cut costs and stick the money in our pockets and just walk away with it. But someday the bill comes due. Ralph Waite, Silver City (2004) Society only tolerates one change at a time. David Bowie, The Prestige (2006) People vote not out of love, but fear. Anthony Hopkins, Nixon (1995) Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. John Lennon, The U.S. vs. John Lennon (2006) This is no longer a nation of independent individuals, it’s a nation of some two-hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods. Peter Finch, Network (1976) Home Personal Links Image Galleries Journeys The Good Old Days The Movie Quotes Project Fiction Rules of the Road Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough. John Huston, Chinatown (1974) The real world is not what you watch on the television. Ewan McGregor, Cassandra’s Dream (2007) In former days, men caught lying would have their testicles tied. Today they get a TV show. Woody Harrelson, The Walker (2007) There are many places in America where there are no sidewalks. What does this say about us? It says that we have to be either in our car, or in our house, or in the mall. Judith Levine, What Would Jesus Buy? (2007) What’s led men to such bloodshed in the name of their beliefs? Jeff Bridges, Arlington Road (1999) You never know who your neighbors are till there’s a crisis. Jonathan Rhys-Myers, Match Point (2005) Return to MQP Home