21 quotes found
"[In the Higgins boat landing craft before the assault] Move fast and clear those murder holes. . . . Keep the sand out of your weapons. Keep those actions clear. I'll see you on the beach."
"Like finding a needle in a stack of needles."
"This Ryan better be worth it. He better go home and cure some disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb, or something. Because to tell you the truth, I wouldn't trade ten Ryans for one Vecchio or one Caparzo."
"You see, when...when you end up killing one of your men, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others."
"[Dying words, to Private Ryan] James... earn this. Earn it."
"I don't know. Part of me thinks the kid's right. What's he done to deserve this? He wants to stay here, fine. Let's leave him and go home. But another part of me thinks, what if we stay, and by some miracle we actually make it out of here alive? Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess. And like you said, Captain: We do that, we all earned the right to go home."
"Tell her that when you found me, I was here, and I was with the only brothers that I have left. And that there's no way I was gonna desert them."
"[Older James Ryan at Captain Miller's grave] My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I wasn't sure how I'd feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. And I've tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes, I've earned what all of you have done for me."
"The mission is a man."
"In the last great invasion of the last great war, The greatest challenge for eight men... was saving one."
"There was only one man left in the family, and the mission was to save him."
"Tom Hanks - Captain Miller"
"Tom Sizemore - Sergeant Horvath"
"Matt Damon - Private Ryan"
"Edward Burns - Private Reiben"
"Barry Pepper - Private Jackson"
"Adam Goldberg - Private Mellish"
"Vin Diesel - Private Caparzo"
"Giovanni Ribisi - Medic Wade"
"Jeremy Davies - Corporal Upham"
"Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg's summer 1998 "blockbuster," is noteworthy [among other reasons for] its recreation of the experience of combat . . . . [A]udiences will surely remember [the film's] attention to the realities of battle . . . . Private Ryan is not anti-war; rather, it is a bloody memorial to the veterans of the crusade against Hitler. . . . We may leave the film with the conviction that war is hell, but not the belief that this war was unworthy of sacrifice. . . . The scene in which Private Ryan's mother sees the priest emerge from the car and she realizes that someone has been killed (she does not yet know that three of her sons are dead) is as powerful as any of the action scenes: She steps out onto the porch and in silent agony slowly sits down to await the news . . . . [Saving Private Ryan] takes the history of combat seriously [and for that] military historians, at least, owe Spielberg a debt. And for those who never saw a battle, Spielberg has enriched the imagination."