"I cannot accept your premise, Socrates. Affectability... progress... are vanities spawned by fear. A vanity spawned by fear. The aim of what you call civilisation is a man in a smokin' jacket, whiskey and soda, pressing a bottom... button, to destroy a planet a billion miles away, kill a billion people he's never seen."

"Dick: [to Tim Hynes, referring to John] What's the matter with him? He'd rather talk to a woman than drink?"

"There's a nice, simple-minded game."

"One thousand dollars. Just... just one more spin... and you're out of it. Out of teaching... out of Tiboonda."

"Oh, I'm a bonded slave of the Education Department... I'm a schoolteacher."

"Jock, you damn near saved my life just now, how 'bout... completing the job by giving me a cigarette, huh?"

"Shall I satisfy your curiosity? I'm a doctor of medicine, and a tramp by temperament. I'm also an alcoholic. My disease prevented me from practicing in Sydney. But out here it's scarcely noticeable. Certainly doesn't stop people from coming to see me. I charge no fees because I'm not interested in money. Anyway, I'm unreliable. But I'm accepted socially because I'm an educated man... or character. I get my food from my friends... my requirements in beer. Which, with some measure of self-control, is the only alcohol I allow myself."

"It's possible to live forever in The Yabba without money. As you probably noticed, some of the natives are very... hospitable. Take Janette, for instance. Now, there's a very interesting biological case. If she were a man, she'd be in jail for rape."

"Jack Thompson as Dick"

"Ezra Miller - Kevin Khatchadourian"

"John C. Reilly - Franklin Plaskett"

"Ashley Gerasimovich - Celia Khatchadourian"

"Siobhan Fallon Hogan - Wanda"

"Tilda Swinton - Eva Khatchadourian"

"It's like this: you wake and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don't hear about that on the 6 o'clock news, why? 'Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch some more TV and maybe it's a fun night and you go out and watch a movie. I mean it's got so bad that half the people on TV, inside the TV, they're watching TV. What are these people watching, people like me?"

"Alex Manette - Colin"

"Reading now what I wrote in 1960 I find that, despite my efforts to express revulsion, nearly everything I said conceals the extraordinary quality of Peeping Tom. See it, and spare a moment to respect the camerawork of Otto Heller."

"The way you feel for this man who’s been tortured by his father and can’t help what he’s doing. Scorsese investigates that same area — they’re never heroes or villains in his movies, they’re something in between. And the critics at the time just couldn’t handle feeling sympathy for this serial killer. They wanted it to go away."

"[Powell's reported reaction to Leo Marks' script] Michael said, "Oh, that's me, a man who kills people with his camera"."

"He [Powell] has got to the trick knife lovingly embedded in the throat, to the voyeur with sound effects, to a nauseating emphasis on the preliminaries and the practice of sadism - and I mean sadism. He did not write Peeping Tom; but he cannot wash his hands of responsibility for this essentially vicious film."

"Today, I find I am convinced that it is a masterpiece. If in some afterlife conversation is permitted, I shall think it my duty to seek out Michael Powell and apologise. Something more than a change of taste must exist."

"Instinct's a wonderful thing, isn't it, Mark? A pity it can't be photographed. [...] So, I'm listening to my instinct now. And it says all this filming isn't healthy, and that you need help."

"The silly bitch! She's fainted in the wrong scene!"

"For a morbid desire to gaze is one of the commonest obsessions in life. Unfortunately Michael Powell's new film is just a clever but corrupt and empty exercise in shock tactics which displays a nervous fascination with the perversion it illustrates."

"Perhaps one would not be so disagreeably affected by this exercise in the lower regions of the psychopathic, were it handled in a more bluntly debased fashion. One does not, after all, waste much indignation on the Draculas and Mummies and Stranglers of the last few years."

"Even brilliant colour photography by Otto Heller cannot reconcile me to a film as loathesome as this. It exploits fears and Inhibitions for the lowest motives. It trades In the self-same kind of obsession that it relates."

"Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear. So I did something very simple. Very simple. When they felt the spike... touching their throat, and knew I was going to kill them, I made them watch their own deaths. I made them see... their own terror as the spike went in. And if death has a face, they saw that too. But not you. I promised I'd never photograph you. Not you."

"I'm afraid. And I'm glad I'm afraid."

"Whatever I photograph, I always lose."

"Take me to your cinema."

"Kurt Long as Deacon"

"Bill Lewis as Oldest Man"

"Han Nah Kim as Asian Girl"

"Molly Jackson as Little girl (Katie)"

"Michael McLafferty as Lawyer"

"Michael Nardelli as Eric"

"Allegra Masters as Pregnant Woman"

"John Edward Lee as Counting man"

"Mercy Malick as Lesbian"

"[to the husband; about his wife] DO YOU WANNA SAVE HER OR NOT?!!!"

"Muneer Katchi as Silent Man"

"You don't have much time."

"One of us gets to live."

"[to everybody, before dying] FUCK Y'ALL, MAN!!"